Reversible Copyright Protection for DNA Microarray Images

The ability of the DNA microarray images of being used in several application domains, such as computer science, medical sciences, biololgy, toxicology, chemistry, ecology, environmental studies and statistics has enabled the collaboration among scientists belonging to different research fields. For this reason, the use/management of such images may be sometimes controlled by ethical or proprietary rules. In this paper, we address the problem of DNA microarray images protection by means of visible watermarking techniques, where the visible watermark serves as a tag or ownership identifier, but can be completely removed to resume the original DNA microarray image. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, we introduce the first reversible visible watermarking scheme explicitly addressed for such type of images. The proposed scheme ensures copyright protection, besides enabling the binding of that image with other information related to it. The visible watermark is securely embedded based on a user-key-controlled embedding mechanism. We remark that by using our scheme it is possible to store only the watermarked copy of a DNA microarray image, without the original one, and then to restore exactly the original image. Finally, we have implemented a working prototype of the scheme we proposed and its validity has been proven through testing.