Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

[Link]

Multipurpose Image Watermarking: Ownership Check,

Tamper Detection and Self-recovery

Rishi Sinhal1 · Irshad Ahmad Ansari1

Received: 12 June 2021 / Revised: 29 November 2021 / Accepted: 30 November 2021 /

Published online: 20 January 2022
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

Abstract
In the present digital scenario, false ownership claims and tampering with digital data
have become serious concerns for users. There have been a very few schemes pro-
posed in the past that can provide solutions for the three major requirements (ownership
proof, tamper detection and self-recovery) in an efficient way. This paper presents a
blind multipurpose image watermarking scheme for copyright/ownership protection,
image authentication, and image restoration. Two different watermarking strategies
(robust and fragile) are used to achieve the multipurpose nature. For Robust watermark
insertion, an encrypted watermark is inserted into the host image using IWT (Integer
wavelet transform). Afterward, a 9-base notation-based least significant bit replace-
ment approach is used to embed the fragile sequence along with recovery information
in a controlled randomized manner. During the testing phase, high imperceptibility,
decent robustness, and good self-recovery are noticed against different types of attack.
The scheme provides nearly 99.8% accurate tamper localization and can significantly
recover even a severely tampered (up to 80%) image. The performance comparison
with other existing watermarking schemes confirms the superiority of the proposed
scheme. The multipurpose nature of the scheme makes it versatile and practical for
the current scenario of digital technologies and era of internet.

Keywords Multipurpose image watermarking · Integer wavelet transform ·

Copyright protection · Image authentication · Image restoration

B Irshad Ahmad Ansari

irshad@[Link]
Rishi Sinhal
[Link]@[Link]

1 Electronics and Communication Engineering, PDPM Indian Institute of Information Technology

Design and Manufacturing, Jabalpur, MP 482005, India
3200 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

1 Introduction

With the advancement in digital technologies, the use of social media becomes very
common in our day to day life. The uploading of images on social media platforms is
one of the primary ways for information sharing in the present time. These images need
to be protected against wrongful ownership claims. At the same time, they must have
the ability to detect tampering and self-recovery (in case attackers modifies the content)
[23]. Images are main communication medium over the social media. Therefore, the
safe communication of digital images needs to be assured by using highly secured
digital technologies. The copyright protection [29], image authentication [30], and the
recovery of the altered portion of the image [28] are some of the imperative matters
that need serious attention with the increase in the digital industry. The security of
digital images against attacks is an important research area among researchers, which
results in a wide verity of solutions like digital watermarking [27], steganography [14],
and cryptography [5]. Watermarking provides many advantages over other methods
including key-based verification and access control [18].
Digital image watermarking is the process of inserting watermark data (e.g., digital
data) into the image [4]. The watermark data are extracted from the watermarked image
at the time of extraction. Digital watermarking can be divided into different categories.
The watermarking schemes are widely used in healthcare, secure communication, and
other areas [4, 5, 18]. Digital watermarking offers verification of ownership/copyright
and image integrity, which is mandatory in the current era of digital media communi-
cation. Let us suppose, a person (owner) uploads an image on a social media platform.
If the image is publically available (this is mostly the case), attacker can easily modify,
tamper, and claim false ownership of the image. If a proper watermarking protection
is provided (before upload), the owner can verify the ownership (using secret key),
prove its authenticity and recover the tampered regions. Figure 1 represents this same
process graphically.

Owner generated
Upload on social
watermarked image
media
with secret key

Attacks: Tampering, False ownership etc. Attackers

Owner’s Attacker’s
secret key Verifying the false key
integrity/ownership

Owner wins the claim

Fig. 1 Image security/verification using digital image watermarking

Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221 3201

The rapid development of digital era demands more advanced watermarking meth-
ods; having multipurpose nature for various applications. Multipurpose watermarking
schemes help to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously, which make it more con-
venient for practical applications [16]. In the literature, many multipurpose image
watermarking methods have been proposed [1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15–17, 19, 24–26,
32–35], but very limited work has been done on methods that can simultaneously
solve three main objectives: ownership proof, tamper detection, and tamper recovery
[2, 24]. In addition, solving three objectives with blind nature and good imper-
ceptibility is still the most challenging task in watermarking domain. Therefore, a
multipurpose image watermarking is proposed in this work to address three objec-
tives (copyright/ownership protection, tamper localization, and self-recovery) in an
efficient and blind manner with good imperceptibility. The main contributions of this
work are as follows:
1. To the best knowledge of authors, first blind multipurpose (with three objectives)
scheme with imperceptibility ~ 41 dB.
2. Even after multipurpose nature, excellent image restoration even for severely tam-
pered images (up to 80% tampered).
3. Average tamper localization is found to be around 99.8%.
4. Very good robustness even after multipurpose nature.

2 Literature Review

Generally, the robust watermarking schemes are used for copyright/ownership ver-
ification. Mostly transform domain schemes (i.e., Fourier Transform (FT), Discrete
Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Lifting Wavelet Trans-
form (LWT), Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), etc.) have been preferred over spatial
domain approaches to get high robustness [2, 15, 24]. IWT maps integer values to
integers with no rounding-off error. Thus, it reduces the loss of information due to
round-off errors and performs efficiently as compare to counterpart transforms [3,
13, 36]. The fragile watermarking detects tamper/forged region and authenticate the
image [35]. Some of the advanced fragile schemes also offer self-recovery of the
image by inserting the recovery data with the fragile watermark during embedding
[32–35]. Multipurpose schemes fulfill two or more requirements at the same time.
Normally, robust and fragile mechanisms are combined in a single scheme to get the
multipurpose nature [2, 24].
To the best knowledge of authors, Lu and Liao [16] presented first ever multipur-
pose watermarking scheme in 2001 that can be used for image authentication and
copyright protection. The watermark embedding was based on the quantization of
wavelet coefficients. The scheme has blind nature and acceptable results to a certain
limit. However, the discussion on the security issues and feature of image restoration
were not provided. Zhu et al. [35] offered a semi-fragile scheme for image water-
marking to provide image authentication and restoration. In this scheme, the Pinned
Sine Transform (PST) was used to embed authentication watermark and restoration
of image was considered as an irregular sampling issue. The repetitive projections
3202 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

onto convex were used to reconstruct the tampered blocks. However, the performance
was limited to low tampering rate. Zhang and Wang [32] introduced a fragile image
watermarking method for authentication and restoration of the image. The embedding
process was based on differential expansion (DE). The image restoration was limited
to the tampering rate less < 3.2% (very low). Additionally, the visual quality of the
watermarked image was also low (approx. 28 dB). Zhang et al. [33] offered two frag-
ile image watermarking methods using the reference sharing mechanism for digital
images. The first method performed efficiently for very low tampering rate (i.e., <
24%). The second scheme used adaptive restoration along with the reference sharing
to get efficient results for the tampering rate < 66%.
Zhang et al. [34] presented a watermarking scheme for tamper localization and
self-recovery. The method was based on compressive sensing, DCT, and Compos-
ite reconstruction. The imperceptibility of the scheme was significant, but the image
restoration was limited to a tampering rate of less than 60%. Ansari et al. [1] pre-
sented a watermarking technique for tamper localization and self-recovery of the
tampered regions. It was based on the spatial domain, block-wise division, singular
value decomposition (SVD), and LSB bit replacement. The scheme has given signif-
icant results. However, the scheme’s ability to restore the image has been limited to
the tampering rate of 50%. Mehta et al. [17] offered a watermarking scheme based
on LWT, QR decomposition, and LSVR (Lagrangian Support Vector Regression) for
protecting ownership/copyright. The robust watermark has been secured by using AT
(Arnold Transform). Acceptable experimental outcomes in terms of robustness have
been achieved but the scheme has only robust nature, and therefore, it could not be
used for tamper detection and self-recovery. Liu et al. [15] proposed a multipurpose
watermarking scheme to offer copyright protection and image authentication. The
scheme was based on DWT, luminance quantization, and an efficient LSB replace-
ment procedure. Results showed the effectiveness of the scheme but it was not secured
against block-based attacks due to lack of organized randomness in fragile sequence,
and block-based self-authentication. Furthermore, it lacked in restoring the tampered
images. Singh and Agarwal [24] offered a multipurpose scheme that can be used for
copyright protection, image authentication, and self-recovery. The chaotic map and
DCT were used to provide security and quantization, respectively. The scheme pro-
vided high robustness but the imperceptibility was poor (≤ 30 dB). Even the image
restoration was limited to a tampering rate of less than 50%. Ansari and Pant [2] estab-
lished a non-blind multipurpose watermarking for gray images using DWT, SVD. The
scheme had acceptable results to protect copyright and check authenticity, along with
significant imperceptibility. Yet the considerable image restoration can be attained
only for a tampering rate < 50%. Also, the non-blind mechanism made it impracti-
cal. Islam and Laskar [10] introduced an image watermarking technique using LWT
and SVD. To extract the watermark, SVM (support vector machine)-based binary
classification process was applied. Experimental outcomes proved that significance
in terms of robustness and imperceptibility, but the embedding capacity (payload)
was low. Additionally, the scheme was unable to provide tamper detection and self-
recovery features. Singh and Singh [25] presented a BTC (block truncation coding)-
and quantization-based fragile watermarking technique for digital images, which can
be used for tamper localization and image recovery. Results demonstrated effective
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221 3203

authentication and recovery, but the significant image restoration was possible only
for the tampering of less than 50%.
Qin et al. [19] offered a novel fragile image watermarking method using non-
uniform watermark sharing and OIBTC (optimal iterative block truncation coding).
Although the results showed significant outcomes in terms of tamper detection and
image recovery but similarly to [1] and [25], the restoration condition required tam-
pering rate ≤ 50%. Islam et al. [11] proposed a watermarking scheme for copyright
protection of digital images based on LWT. To extract the robust watermark, SVM
classifier has been employed. The scheme gave considerable results; however, the
embedding payload (capacity) of the scheme was significantly low and multipurpose
nature was also not there. Haghighi et al. [7] offered a blind multipurpose image water-
marking method based on Shearlet transform using MLP and NSGA-II algorithms.
The embedding threshold and blocks got selected using an optimization approach
for watermarking. The method provided good results for copyright protection/image
authentication to a certain limit against attacks. However, the method did not provide
image restoration capability. Daneshmandpour et al. [6] introduced a fragile scheme
for tamper detection and self-recovery of gray images. The detection of tampering
in the images was based on the cyclic redundancy check (CRC), whereas the image
recovery process was based on Embedded Zero Block Coding (EZBC), bit stream-
ing and rate allocation. Although a multi-scale recovery process provides acceptable
results, the scheme can’t tolerate tampering more than 72%. Additionally, the scheme
used the block size of 8 × 8 for watermarking, which reduces the detection accuracy
significantly.
With reference to the above discussed literature, it is quite evident that the multi-
purpose watermarking is still an open and challenging research area. Existing schemes
are unable to provide an acceptable solution for ownership protection, image authen-
tication, and image restoration simultaneously. Even though a few existing schemes
such as [24] and [2] fulfill all three purposes, yet they have other serious limitations.
For example, [24] has poor imperceptibility and [2] has a non-blind mechanism that
required the original host for the extraction process. The proposed work offers a blind
multipurpose scheme to provide effective solutions for the mentioned issues without
compromising the performance.

3 Proposed Scheme

The proposed scheme has four main parts: (1) Watermark preparation, (2) Watermark
embedding, (3) Watermark extraction (for ownership and tamper check), and (4) Image
self-recovery. Robust watermark is embedded in the transform domain using IWT
after double layers of encryptions (using Arnold Transform (AT) [31] and XOR key).
Encryption provides extra security to the robust watermark. Fragile watermark is
embedded using 9-base notation-based least significant bit replacement [15]. Each
part of the proposed framework is explained in detail as follows:
3204 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

3.1 Watermark Preparation

In the proposed scheme, the pseudo-random binary sequences are used for robust
watermark encryption (XOR-based) and fragile watermarking. In context to digital
image watermarking, the pseudo-random binary representation helps to secure the
watermarking system against illegal reach. Further, it improves the robust watermark-
ing results against cropping, content removal, and other common attacks. In terms
of fragile watermarking, it improves the authentication results in an effective man-
ner against copy-move, copy-paste, and other types of tampering attacks. Moreover,
it ensures the authenticity and safety of the digital data because no one can decrypt
or access the data in its actual form without the knowledge of the secret key. Thus,
the pseudo-random binary sequences can be effective in order to get better results
with added security in digital watermarking schemes. Mersenne Twister (MT) is one
of the widely used PRNG (pseudo-random number generation) algorithms [12, 21].
The sequence obtained by PRNG generator remains deterministic in nature and can
be reproduced by using the initial value (i.e., seed value). A variant of MT algo-
rithm known as SFMT (SIMD-Oriented Fast Mersenne Twister) is used in this work
because of its faster speed and improved equi-distribution feature [22]. SFMT gener-
ates floating-point numbers ranging between 0 and 1, each element (Numval ) of the
sequence is converted into Binval (i.e., binary value 0 or 1) using Eq. (1).

0 if Numval < 0.5
Binval = (1)
1 if Numval ≥ 0.5

This generated Binval is used in robust as well as fragile watermark preparation for
different purposes, which are discussed in following sections.

3.1.1 Robust Watermark Preparation

The robust watermark Wrobust (i.e., binary image of size 32 × 32) is encrypted to get
better security against unauthorized access. At first, AT transform is applied on the
robust watermark for K 1 (secret key-1) times. It converts Wrobust to scrambled noisy
form WAT . Next, a random binary sequence Wran_1 is produced using K 2 (secret key-2)
with the help of SFMT generator of length 32 × 32. Next, XOR operation is performed
between corresponding bits of Wran_1 and W AT , which generates Wencrypted (of size 32
× 32). The process of robust watermark preparation and encrypted robust watermark
are shown in Fig. 2a, b, respectively. Only correct keys (K 1 and K 2 ) can decrypt the
robust watermark to original form.

3.1.2 Fragile Watermark Preparation

The host image is divided into 2 × 4 size non-overlapping blocks (total blocks =
TB).A random binary sequence Wran_2 is produced using K 3 (secret key-3) with the
help of SFMT generator of length 6 × TB. The average blocks intensities of every 2 ×
4 are converted into 8-bit binary representation. 6 MSB (most significant bit) of these
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221 3205

Wencrypted
Wrobust Arnold WAT
XOR
K1 Transform

SFMT based Wran _1

K2 random binary
sequence generation Wrobust Wencrypted

(a) (b)

Fig. 2 a Robust watermark preparation. b The robust watermark and its encrypted watermark

SFMT based Sequentially select

random binary Wran _ 2 and cascade every 6 W fragile + re cov
K3
sequence bits from Wran_2
generation and Wrecov

Block wise
Host division
image
Wre cov

For each block

Extract 6 MSB for all
Calculate blocks and
Binary
average pixel concatenate them
conversion
value using randomization

K4

Fig. 3 Fragile watermark preparation in order to preserve the recovery data along with the authentication
data

8 bits are concatenate in a controlled randomized manner using K 4 (secret key-4) to

generate recovery watermark data (Wrecov ). Now, Every 6 bits from both sequences
(i.e., Wran_2 and Wrecov ) and cascaded. Finally, the combined watermark Wfragile+recov
is obtained from this cascading. Figure 3 presents the process of generating the water-
mark Wfragile+recov .

3.2 Watermark Embedding

The watermark insertion (Robust and Fragile) process is described as follows.

3.2.1 Robust Embedding

The following steps show the embedding of the robust watermark (i.e., Wencrypted ) into
the host image.
Step-1 Divide the host image into 16 × 16 size non-overlapping blocks.
Step-2 Apply IWT transform on the first block to get LL, LH, HL, and HH bands.
Again apply IWT on the LH band to get LL1, LH1, HL1, and HH1.
3206 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

Step-3 Calculate modification coefficients using Eq. (2).

Mcoeff-1 = {α−(HL1avg − LH1avg )}/2 and Mcoeff-2 = {α−(LH1avg − HL1avg )}/2 (2)

Here, α is the embedding parameter, LH1avg and HL1avg denote average value of
pixels of LH1 and HL1, respectively.
Step-4 Embed first bit of Wencrypted by updating the LH1 and HL1 coefficients using
Eq. (3) and Eq. (4).
⎧
⎨ LH1(x, y) − Mcoeff-1 if w_bit = 1 and HL1avg − LH1avg <α
LH1(x, y) = LH1(x, y) + Mcoeff-2 if w_bit = 0 and LH1avg − HL1avg <α
⎩
LH1(x, y) otherwise
(3)
⎧
⎨ HL1(x, y) + Mcoeff-1 if w_bit = 1 and HL1avg − LH1avg <α
HL1(x, y) = HL1(x, y) − Mcoeff-2 if w_bit = 0 and LH1avg − HL1avg <α
⎩
HL1(x, y) otherwise
(4)

Step-5 Perform inverse IWT operation twice to get the robust watermarked block.
Step-6 Repeat steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 for each block to embed each bit of Wencrypted in
blocks sequentially.
Step-7 Finally combine the blocks to generate the robust watermarked image
(Watermarkedr ).

3.2.2 Fragile Embedding

The following steps show the embedding of the watermark (Wfragile+recov ) into the
image (Watermarkedr ).
Step-1 Divide the image (Watermarkedr ) into 2 × 4 size of non-overlapping blocks.
Then, sequentially select 12 bits of watermark data from Wfragile+recov for each block.
Step-2 Choose the first block and consider that each column is representing a pixel
unit (with 2 pixels). Thus, each 2x4 size block has four units (e.g., U1, U2, U3, and
U4).
Step-3 Convert 12-bit watermark into 9-base number Wat_9 in such a way that it
has four digits (e.g., Wat_9 = d1d2d3d4).
Step-4 Modify pixels of U1 using d1 as per the given steps.
• Compute digit Fembed as shown in Eq. (5). Here,Pk is the kth pixel of unit U.
 n 

Fembed = 3 Pk . mod 3n where n = 2
k−1
(5)
k=1

• Calculate x as given in Eq. (6).

3n − 1
x = d − Fembed + mod 3n (6)
2
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221 3207

 
• Change x into x by converting into 3-base number as x = y1 y2 …..yn , where yi

denotes the ith digit of x for 1 ≤ i ≤ n. Next, get x " =z1 z2 …..zn , where zi = yi − 1.
• Add digits of x " to the pixels of unit U to get the updated pixels as shown in Eq. (7).

1≤ k ≤ n
P_newk = Pk + z i where (7)
i =n−k+1

• Repeat the steps with U2, U3, and U4 to embed d2, d3, and d4, respectively.
Step-5 Repeat step 2, 3, and 4 for each block to get the dual watermarked image
W _img.

3.3 Watermark Extraction

The attacker can modify the watermarked image (W _img) considering that the owner
may have uploaded it on a public platform. In such a situation, robust watermark can be
used to check the ownership and fragile watermark can be used for content verification
and self-recovery.

3.3.1 Robust Watermark Extraction (Ownership Check)

During simulation, common signal processing attacks have been used to check the
performance of the scheme. Following steps show the extraction process from the
attacked image:
Step-1 Divide the attacked image into blocks (i.e., 16 × 16 size) that are uniform
and non-overlapping.
Step-2 Get LL, LH, HL, and HH by applying IWT on the first block. Next, perform
IWT on LH band to get LH1 and HL1.
Step-3 Calculate average values LH1avg and HL1avg , and extract the bit as per
Eq. (8).

0 if HL1avg ≤ LH1avg
Extbit = (8)
1 if HL1avg > LH1avg

Step-4 Repeat step 2 and 3 on each block to extract all bits from the attacked
watermarked image.
Step-5 Reshape the extracted bits and decrypt it via reversing the encryption process
to get the extracted watermark Wextracted .

3.3.2 Fragile Watermark Extraction (Tamper Check)

The following steps show the authentication process to check the tampering:
Step-1 Divide the attacked watermarked image into 2 × 4 size blocks and extract
the four digits (Fext ) using Eq. (5) from each block.
Step-2 Convert the four digit 9-base number (i.e., Fext_1 Fext_2 Fext_3 Fext_4 ) into
binary (i.e., 12 bit size). Similarly, extract 12-bit number from each block.
3208 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

Step-3 Get EWran_2 by concatenating initial 6-bits concerning each block. Likewise,
get EWrecov by cascading last 6 bits related to each block.
Step-4 Generate binary sequence Wran_2 using K 3 -based SFMT process and Eq. (1).
Further, compare the corresponding bits of EWran_2 and Wran_2 to authenticate the
image. If the bits are different, then the concerning block is marked as tampered.
Step-5 Apply the block-neighborhood approach to smoothen the resultant of Step
4. For smoothing, eight neighborhood blocks (except corner positions) of each block
is considered. If majority of the blocks (out of these nine blocks) are tampered/non-
tampered, the block is also marked as tampered/non-tampered.

3.4 Image Self-recovery

The authenticated image (after tamper localization) can be divided into tampered
blocks and non-tampered blocks. Further, the tampered blocks can also be classified
into two types. (1) Reserved feature blocks: The tampered blocks, whose mapping
blocks are not tampered. (2) Ruined feature blocks: The tampered blocks, whose
mapping blocks are also tampered.
At first, reserved feature blocks are recovered with the help the mapping. The recov-
ery information from the mapped block is extracted (6 MSB) using K 4 and padded
with “00” to make it 8 bit. This 8 bit (after decimal conversion) is used to replace
pixel values of reserved feature block. Then after, Ruined feature blocks are recov-
ered through the adaptive neighborhood block averaging (ANBA) process. Figure 4
represents the ANBA process for the recovery for the tampered block ‘T ’.
Here, average intensity “μ” is calculated for each valid (non-tampered or recovered)
neighbor block. Next, the average (X) of all valid “μ” values is obtained as shown
in Fig. 4. At last, X is substituted on all pixel positions of tampered block “T ”. In
the same way, repeat the process for every tampered block. Afterward, the ANBA

Non-tampered
blocks

µi-1,j-1 µi-1,j+1 µi-1,j-1 µi-1,j+1

X X X X
µi,j-1 T µi,j+1 µi,j-1 X XTX X µi,j+1
ANBA process
for the recovery
of tampered
µi+1,j+1 block ‘T’ µi+1,j+1

Recovered (µi −1, j −1 +µi-1,j+1 + µi,j-1 + µi,j+1 + µi+1,j+1 )

Where X =
blocks Tampered blocks no. of valid blocks (non - tampered / re cov ered )
Fig. 4 Adaptive neighborhood block averaging for the recovery of block ‘T ’
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221 3209

process is applied one more time to improve recovery. Finally, the recovered image is
obtained.

4 Experimental Results and Discussion

Testing has been performed over 150 images of size 512 × 512 (selected from reference
[9]); including medical, texture, and other standard test images. Here result of selected
images (Fig. 5) is shown for succinct representation. A binary image (i.e., 32 × 32
size) is used as the robust watermark. For robust watermarking, the value of embedding
parameter α is selected as α = 11 based on the experimental evaluation in order to keep
the significant trade-off between imperceptibility and robustness. The imperceptibility
results are obtained by calculating PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio) [20] and SSIM
(structural similarity index) [8] for different test images as shown in Table 1.

Fig. 5 Host images a Lena b M-1 c pepper d Barbara e Mandrill f F-16g Living room h House i M-2
j M-3kM-4lM-5 m Bricks n Robust binary watermark image

Table 1 PSNR and SSIM results

for test images (after S. No Host image PSNR SSIM
embedding)
1 Lena 41.1679 0.9667
2 M-1 41.7015 0.9107
3 Pepper 41.0098 0.9650
4 Barbara 41.1644 0.9734
5 Mandrill 40.1993 0.9823
6 F-16 40.6816 0.9554
7 Living room 40.3795 0.9733
8 House 41.2269 0.9490
9 M-2 41.2793 0.9480
10 M-3 41.9708 0.9091
11 M-4 41.6666 0.9501
12 M-5 41.8079 0.9475
13 Bricks 40.9271 0.9861
3210 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

The average PSNR value is found to be 41.17 and the average SSIM as 0.9551.
Results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is highly imperceptible to the
viewers. As specified in the previous sections, the proposed scheme is a dual watermark
approach and has multipurpose nature. It can be used for multiple applications such
as copyright protection, ownership verification, tamper detection, tamper localization,
and image self-recovery. Robust and fragile watermarking results are as follows:

4.1 Robust Watermarking Results

Different image processing attacks have been applied on the watermarked image before
extracting the watermark. It gives a better insight into the robust feature of the scheme
against attacks. The robustness results have been evaluated in terms of BER (bit error
rate) [17]. As described in Table 2, the same watermark gets extracted (i.e., BER =
0) when the watermarked image is not attacked. In the case of different noise attacks
like Gaussian noise (GN), speckle noise (SN), and Salt and Pepper noise (SPN), etc.,
the robust mechanism of the proposed scheme gives remarkable results. Similarly, the
significant robustness is achieved against filtering attacks such as Median filter (MF),
Gaussian filter (GF), and Wiener filter (WF). However, the scheme needs to improve
against rotation attacks. The comparison (Table 3) of the proposed robust mechanism
with other existing robust schemes has been performed; which testify the dominance
of the proposed scheme over the existing schemes.

4.2 Fragile Watermarking Results

In order to authenticate the image against forgery, the scheme has been checked by
applying different tampering attacks. Further, the tampered region is also recovered
successfully during experimentation. It is important to note that, the tamper detection
process would be block-wise rather than pixel-wise. Therefore, even if one pixel of a
block (i.e., 2 × 4 pixels) is tampered, the complete block would be considered as the
tampered block. In general, the tampering/forgery is done on a portion of an image
and not on a specific pixel, hence the scheme is very effective for tamper detection.
For quantitative analysis, the parametric values TDeff , PSNR and SSIM have been
obtained for different tampering rates (TR). Here, TDeff represents the efficiency of
tamper detection and it is the ratio of the number of detected tampered blocks and the
number of total tampered blocks. These parameters give an impression of an effective
performance of the proposed scheme in terms of detection and self-recovery of the
tampered part of the attacked image. The visual quality of the recovered image has
been studied with respect to the watermarked (WM) image.
As presented in Table 4, the proposed scheme is able to detect and recover the tam-
pered part of the watermarked image, even for quite high tampering rates. Different
types of attacks (i.e., tampering) are applied on the watermarked images and average
detection rate of 99.8% is obtained. Further, the significant results for self-recovery of
the tampered images are obtained for different tampering rates. A tampered image can
be recovered significantly for tampering rate up to 80%. Result of content tampering
is presented in Table 5. Table 6 presents the investigational results for the recovery
Table 2 Robustness (BER) results for host images

Attacks BER

Lena M-1 Pepper Barbara Mandrill F-16 Living room House M-2 M-3 M-4 M-5 Bricks

Attack free 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Resize (x-2x-x) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Adjust Intensity[γ = 0.6] 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Adjust Intensity[γ = 0.8] 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
SN[0.01] 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.04 0.01 0.02 0.04 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.02
GN (0.001) 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00
GN (0.005) 0.04 0.10 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.04 0.04 0.05 0.11 0.05 0.03 0.04
JPEG(40) 0.02 0.12 0.02 0.02 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.02 0.07 0.25 0.11 0.07 0.02
JPEG(50) 0.00 0.07 0.01 0.01 0.05 0.03 0.04 0.00 0.04 0.18 0.02 0.06 0.01
JPEG(60) 0.00 0.06 0.01 0.00 0.04 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.03 0.15 0.00 0.03 0.01
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

JPEG(70) 0.00 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.02 0.03 0.00 0.03 0.06 0.00 0.01 0.01
JPEG (80) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
JPEG2000 (CR = 5) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.07 0.01
JPEG2000 (CR = 10) 0.04 0.00 0.02 0.22 0.14 0.06 0.15 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.28 0.15
MF[3,3] 0.06 0.01 0.11 0.09 0.11 0.09 0.15 0.01 0.00 0.03 0.01 0.28 0.17
GF[3 × 3] 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
WF[3 × 3] 0.02 0.01 0.04 0.04 0.07 0.07 0.09 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.18 0.07
Sharpening [0.2] 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Crop(20 pixel on sides) 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03
Crop(5% pixel at Mid) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
3211
Table 2 (continued)
3212

Attacks BER

Lena M-1 Pepper Barbara Mandrill F-16 Living room House M-2 M-3 M-4 M-5 Bricks

SPN (.001) 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00
SPN (.01) 0.02 0.07 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.02 0.01 0.03 0.09 0.03 0.03 0.02
Motion blur(θ = 7,len-10) 0.02 0.00 0.04 0.03 0.10 0.07 0.09 0.04 0.02 0.01 0.00 0.10 0.04
Rotation (2°) 0.49 0.50 0.49 0.46 0.48 0.48 0.49 0.48 0.49 0.50 0.49 0.49 0.48
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221
Table 3 Robustness (BER) results comparison with existing schemes

Attacks Lena Pepper Mandrill

Mehta Islam Islam Proposed Mehta Islam Islam Proposed Mehta Islam Islam Proposed
et al. and et al. work et al. and et al. work et al. and et al. work
[17] laskar [11] [17] laskar [11] [17] laskar [11]
[10] [10] [10]

SPN 0.164 0.158 0.133 0.060 0.197 0.186 0.148 0.053 0.177 0.176 0.109 0.056
(0.02)
SPN 0.115 0.125 0.049 0.013 0.123 0.122 0.068 0.019 0.103 0.084 0.049 0.014
(0.01)
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

SPN 0.057 0.056 0.037 0.008 0.056 0.047 0.031 0.002 0.052 0.047 0.022 0.007
(0.005)
GN (0.01) 0.358 0.346 0.215 0.100 0.364 0.365 0.213 0.112 0.328 0.299 0.193 0.100
GN 0.249 0.213 0.113 0.040 0.264 0.193 0.137 0.043 0.248 0.229 0.111 0.034
(0.005)
GN 0.055 0.047 0.016 0.000 0.056 0.465 0.014 0.000 0.068 0.057 0.014 0.000
(0.001)
JPEG 70 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.005 0.000 0.004 0.040
JPEG 50 0.002 0.002 0.006 0.005 0.002 0.002 0.002 0.007 0.026 0.012 0.010 0.050
3213
3214 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

Table 4 Image authentication and self-recovery (with respect to the watermarked image) results for different
tampering rates
Results for Results for
TR Tampered Image Image tamper TR Tampered Image Image tamper
(%) image authentication recovery detection and (%) image authentication recovery detection and
self-recovery self-recovery

=100% =99.95%
1 PSNR=53.89 40 PSNR=26.76
SSIM=0.9980 SSIM=0.8729

=99.8% =100%
5 PSNR=41.67 50 PSNR=36.44
SSIM=0.9891 SSIM=0.9069

=99.88% =99.96%
10 PSNR=40.60 60 PSNR=24.21
SSIM=0.9785 SSIM=0.6758

=99.88% =100%
20 PSNR=30.85 70 PSNR=24.94
SSIM=0.9324 SSIM=0.7151

=99.99% =99.94%
30 PSNR=30.20 80 PSNR=24.46
SSIM=0.8895 SSIM=0.7629

Table 5 Image authentication and self-recovery results (with respect to the watermarked image) for random
tampering attacks
Image Image recovery Image Image recovery
Tampered image Tampered image
authentication (PSNR, SSIM) authentication (PSNR, SSIM)

38.83, 0.9697 28.36, 0.8669

36.03, 0.9065 20.50, 0.6636

31.48, 0.9547 25.68, 0.8223

28.98, 0.8349 31.05, 0.9129

of tampered area of test images for different tampering rates in terms of PSNR and
SSIM, which proves the effectiveness of the scheme. The results show that the pro-
posed scheme is very useful to provide protection, authentication and recovery against
different types of attacks.
Table 7 describes the performance of different fragile schemes, which clearly proves
Table 6 Results (PSNR, SSIM) for self-recovery of the tampered images at different tampering rates

TR PSNR, SSIM
(%)
Lena M-1 Pepper Barbara Mandrill F-16 Living House M-2 M-3 M-4 M-5 Bricks
room

1 53.89, 51.27, 47.87, 43.78, 40.44, 51.95, 49.21, 60.02, 54.30, 54.38, 58.09, 60.29, 42.53,
0.9980 0.9977 0.9972 0.9976 0.9952 0.9978 0.9976 0.9992 0.9986 0.9980 0.9945 0.9969 0.9941
5 45.74, 45.83, 39.54, 39.46, 33.81, 47.18, 41.22, 53.15, 48.01, 43.43, 42.07, 38.92, 36.47,
0.9883 0.9921 0.9872 0.9897 0.9765 0.9919 0.9841 0.9959 0.9929 0.9891 0.9739 0.9884 0.9736
10 39.38, 43.94, 36.34, 35.96, 31.30, 41.05, 37.75, 44.53, 43.92, 39.05, 39.58, 37.34, 33.31,
0.9733 0.9859 0.9706 0.9771 0.9537 0.9832 0.9674 0.9894 0.9857 0.9769 0.9588 0.9807 0.9475
20 34.35, 41.03, 33.45, 33.51, 28.98, 33.80, 32.58, 38.29, 41.72, 38.21, 37.27, 35.84, 30.03,
0.9342 0.9734 0.9403 0.9470 0.9113 0.9617 0.9265 0.9713 0.9684 0.9525 0.9383 0.9639 0.8907
30 30.76, 37.92, 31.48, 31.27, 27.64, 30.32, 30.24, 35.03, 39.52, 36.31, 35.38, 33.94, 27.71,
0.8926 0.9544 0.9093 0.9096 0.8655 0.9323 0.8833 0.9508 0.9502 0.9288 0.9167 0.9463 0.8269
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

40 28.48, 35.88, 29.51, 28.12, 26.49, 27.75, 28.02, 32.14, 37.35, 34.23, 33.52, 32.57, 25.85,
0.8512 0.9346 0.8714 0.8505 0.8177 0.8936 0.8327 0.9254 0.9299 0.9032 0.8930 0.9265 0.7588
50 26.67, 34.11, 28.02, 26.06, 25.18, 25.89, 26.48, 30.40, 36.25, 32.16, 31.75, 31.29, 24.26,
0.8000 0.9101 0.8257 0.7853 0.7589 0.8494 0.7730 0.8988 0.9076 0.8722 0.8623 0.9004 0.6860
60 25.05, 31.50, 26.69, 24.51, 23.80, 24.40, 24.72, 28.06, 34.66, 29.62, 30.24, 29.81, 22.70,
0.7403 0.8727 0.7748 0.7156 0.6781 0.7992 0.7034 0.8622 0.8777 0.8217 0.8317 0.8623 0.5940
70 23.58, 26.80, 25.11, 23.16, 22.50, 23.29, 23.36, 26.68, 33.11, 27.89, 28.61, 28.32, 21.72,
0.6818 0.8318 0.7201 0.6477 0.5892 0.7524 0.6321 0.8249 0.8442 0.7725 0.7919 0.8170 0.5080
80 21.91, 25.84, 23.31, 21.36, 21.11, 21.84, 22.05, 24.78, 31.05, 24.77, 25.84, 25.72, 20.24,
0.6056 0.7591 0.6480 0.5495 0.4732 0.6902 0.5431 0.7756 0.7984 0.7073 0.7223 0.7389 0.4038
90 18.81, 16.15, 19.67, 18.86, 19.12, 19.69, 19.56, 21.33, 25.14, 17.94, 22.04, 20.49, 18.41,
0.4969 0.5425 0.5443 0.4317 0.3390 0.6058 0.4288 0.6902 0.7253 0.5621 0.5689 0.5675 0.2842
3215
3216 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

Table 7 Performance comparisons (fragile nature) with existing schemes

Methods PSNR (in dB) Condition for

successful
WM (After Recovered image restoration
embedding)
w.r.t. WM w.r.t. host

Zhu et al. [35] 36.7 22.8 22.8 Regions storing the

recovery data must
be intact
Zhang and Wang [32] 28.7 +∞ +∞ TR < 3.2%
Zhang et al. [33]-A 37.9 +∞ 40.7 TR < 24%
Zhang et al. [33]-B 37.9 [22, 40] [22, 40] TR < 66%
Zhang et al. [34] 37.9 N.A [23, 41] TR < 60%
Ansari et al. [1] 44 28 N.A TR ≤ 50%
Singh and Singh [25] 39.0 [28.4, 40] N.A TR < 50%
Qin et al. [19]-A 44.2 N.A [33, 42] TR < 45%
Qin et al. [19]-B 44.2 N.A [31, 40] TR < 50%
Proposed scheme 41.17 [23.8,48.7] [19.5,40] TR ≤ 80%

the superiority of the proposed fragile watermarking mechanism. The performance of

different techniques is compared in terms of PSNR of watermarked image (i.e., after
embedding) and PSNR of recovered image. In addition, successful recovery condition
has been compared with existing fragile watermarking methods. Most of the schemes
such as [32–35], and [19]-B used an 8 × 8 block size for watermarking. Thus, if
one pixel got tampered then the complete block (including 63 non-tampered pixels)
is considered as a tampered region. Subsequently, preserved recovery information is
used to restore the tampered region (which was almost original or non-tampered).
Consequently, the performance decreases in terms of image restoration especially in
case of severe tampering as can be seen in Table 7. Similarly, the schemes [1] and
[19]-A used 4 × 4 size blocks for watermarking but their condition of restoration
gets limited up to tampering rate of 50% and 45%, respectively. On the other side,
the scheme [25] employed 2 × 2 size blocks during watermarking. The restoration
capacity gets limited to a 50% tampering rate because the scheme [25] used only 5-
MSB bits as the recovery data for each block. In conclusion, small block size limits the
size of the recovery data and large block size limits the tamper localization capability.
Therefore, the proposed scheme opted for the block size of 2 × 4 for watermarking,
which let us embed significant tamper detection data (6-bit) as well as the significant
recovery data (i.e., 6 MSB bits) with decent localization ability. In addition, the ANBA
approach provides remarkable improvement in recovery at high tampering rates. While
maintaining the visual quality of the image, the scheme can recover the tampered area
even for the 80% tampering rate. It should be noted that the proposed scheme is a
multipurpose and dual watermarking scheme. Even then it provides better/significant
performance as compared to the schemes dedicated to a specific purpose. There-
fore, the scheme provides improved alternative for image security and monitoring. To
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221 3217

investigate the restoration results, the average parametric values (i.e., PSNR etc.) have
been calculated during the thorough experimentation. For restored images, the aver-
age range of PSNR values is [23.83, 48.78] (with respect to the watermarked image)
and [19.54, 39.98] (with respect to the host image) for less than 80% tampering rate.
Moreover, the average PSNR value for watermarked images turns out to be 41.17 that
signify that the imperceptibility feature of the scheme is eminently admissible.

4.3 Security Analysis

The discussion about the security features of the proposed method and the advantage
of dual watermark (robust and fragile) approach is presented in this section. During
robust watermarking, the robust watermark has been encrypted before embedding
process using Arnold transform and secret key-based random binary sequence. There-
fore, even if someone illegally gets the extracted watermark, the actual/original form
of the watermark information remains unintelligible. Thus, the watermark data would
be utilizable only for the users with the correct secret key. Additionally, the embed-
ding strategy is robust enough to counter general image processing attacks and provide
copyright protection for images. Similarly, fragile watermarking mechanism is secured
enough by using secret key-based fragile watermark data. The authentication informa-
tion is completely based on secret key (seed value). During tampering detection and
localization, the extracted authentication data is compared with the generated authen-
tication data (key-based). It means that one cannot perform authentication without
having secret key values. Therefore, the tamper detection and localization process is
highly sensitive to the secret keys. Moreover, the recovery data of each 2 × 4 block
is stored into another block using a specific key-based pseudo-random order. Only
the knowledge of the correct key can provide the information of the block that has
been used to preserve the recovery data of a block. Thus, both robust as well as fragile
watermarking mechanisms are highly secured.
Many times, attackers use LSB modification tools to modify the LSB bits. In the
proposed work, the fragile watermarking framework does not modify the LSB bits
directly. Instead of this, the complete 2 × 4 size block is processed during fragile
watermarking using a base-9 number system framework. Hence, attackers cannot
extract the fragile watermark via LSB tools because LSB bits are not modified directly
based on watermark bits. Therefore, if the attackers produce a counterfeit image using
such tools then the generated image would not be able to pass the authentication
process. Nonetheless, counterfeit attacks can also create issues of fake ownership
claims, as discussed by authors [15]. To claim ownership, attackers can use completely
different watermarking schemes or can frame up the embedding sub-bands. Even
multiple users can claim over digital data by modifying or replacing the watermarking
strategy. In such cases, the proposed dual watermarking approach can successfully
deal with such types of attacks. The attacked image (e.g., counterfeit attacks) can be
detected as a forged one during image authentication. Thus, it would be obvious that
the extracted robust watermark is not correct because the image has been manipulated.
When both the watermarks (robust as well as fragile) are extracted correctly and it is
found that the image has not been altered, only then the user wins the ownership claim.
3218 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

Hereby it is clear that the proposed multipurpose and dual watermarking mechanism
is highly secured while providing image authentication, self-recovery, and copyright
protection.

4.4 Relative Study with Other Existing Multipurpose Watermarking Schemes

The proposed scheme contains dual watermarking (both robust as well as fragile)
mechanism. This scheme can be used effectively for copyright protection, image
authentication and image restoration; thus, the scheme is having multipurpose nature.
The multipurpose nature makes the watermarking methods more useful and highly
desired. It can be used for different applications at the same time. Some of the mul-
tipurpose watermarking schemes from the watermarking literature have been studied
and compared with the proposed watermarking method to analyze the relative features.
Table 8 compares the features of the proposed watermarking method with existing mul-
tipurpose watermarking schemes. From the analysis, it is observed that the proposed
scheme is more versatile and efficient than the existing schemes.

5 Conclusion

The proposed work offered a blind multipurpose image watermarking scheme that can
be used for efficient copyright protection, image authentication, and self-recovery of
the image. The robust mechanism worked very well against various signal processing
attacks and was able to extract robust watermark efficiently. The fragile procedure
was able to detect and localize the tampered portion with more than 99.8% accu-
racy. Additionally, a satisfactory restoration of the image is achieved for tampering
rate up to 80%. The scheme was made secure against unauthorized access via four
secret keys. Experimental results showed remarkable results in terms of watermarking
parameters like PSNR, SSIM, BER, tamper detection accuracy, and image recovery.
The limitation of the proposed work includes the poor robustness performance against
the rotational attacks, which will be investigated and solved in future research work.
Future research directions also includes the possibility of improving the impercepti-
bility feature by incorporating better embedding framework without compromising
the other characteristics. Furthermore, the scheme will be extended for color images
in future.
Table 8 Comparison of proposed watermarking method with existing schemes (multipurpose nature)

S No Characteristic Lu and Liao Ansari Liu et al. [15] Singh and Ansari and Haghighi et al. Daneshmandpour Proposed
features [16] et al. [1] Agarwal Pant [2] [7] et al. [6] scheme
[24]

1 Nature of the Blind Blind Blind Blind Non-blind Blind Blind Blind
scheme
2 Copyright Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes
/ownership
3 Image Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
authentication
4 Image No Yes No Yes Yes No Yes Yes
restoration
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

5 Embedding ∼ 40 ∼ 44 ∼ 40 ∼ 30 ∼ 38 ∼ 38 ∼ 44 ∼ 41
PSNR (dB)
6 Security + +++ ++ +++ ++ ++ ++++ ++++
7 Robustness ++ - +++ ++++ +++ +++ - ++++
8 Host image Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
(gray)
9 Embedding Transform + Spatial Transform + Transform Transform + Transform + Spatial Transform +
domain Transform Spatial + Spatial Spatial Transform Spatial
10 Watermarking Robust + Fragile Robust + Robust + Robust + Robust + Fragile Robust +
type Fragile Fragile Fragile fragile Semi-fragile Fragile
3219
3220 Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing (2022) 41:3199–3221

Funding Not applicable.

Data Availability The dataset used is publicly available on the internet.

Code Availability The code will be made available on reasonable demand.

Declarations

Conflict of interest There is no conflict of interest.

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