FEATURE-BASED DIGITAL WATERMARKING FOR REMOTE SENSING IMAGES

Abstract. With the rapid development of information and communication technology, people can acquire and distribute many kinds of digital data more conveniently than before. The consequence is that the "copyright protection" which prevents digital data from been duplicated illegally should be paid much more attention. Digital watermarking is the process of embedding visible or invisible information into a digital signal which may be used to verify its authenticity or the identity of its owners. In the past, digital watermarking technology has been successfully applied to the "copyright protection" of multimedia data, however the researches and applications of applying digital watermarking to geo-information data are still very inadequate. In this study, a novel digital watermarking algorithm based on the scale-space feature points is applied to the remote sensing images, and the robustness of the embedded digital watermark and the impact on satellite image quality are evaluated and analysed. This kind of feature points are commonly invariant to Image rotation, scaling and translation, therefore they naturally fit into the requirement of geometrically robust image watermarking. The experiment results show almost all extracted watermarks have high values of normal correlation and can be recognized clearly after the processing of image compression, brightness adjustment and contrast adjustment. In addition, most of the extracted watermarks are identified after the geometric attacks. Furthermore, the unsupervised image classification is implemented on the watermarked images to evaluate the image quality reduction and the results show that classification accuracy is affected slightly after embedding watermarks into the satellite images.