Protection and Authentication of Dubai Digital Elevation Model using Hybrid Watermarking Technique

Nowadays, with the availability of digital images and models at no cost on the World Wide Web, the need to provide copyright protection of multimedia data arises. Hence, digital watermarking products have been in high demand. Digital watermarking essentially embeds information into data in such a way that data usage is not affected, and it simultaneously protects and authenticates the data. This research paper deals with the development and evaluation of a watermarking technique for protection and authentication of Dubai Digital Elevation Model (DEM) provided by United States Geological Survey (USGS). The technique uses a hybrid combination of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and it is implemented for the protection of DEM by embedding the ownership information in hybrid DCT-DWT domain and for checking the integrity of the elevation model by embedding hash-key information in the spatial domain. The proposed watermarking technique causes minimal distortion to the DEM and the performance is assessed by using Peak Singal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Wavelet Signal-to-Noise Ratio (WSNR), and Structural Similarity Index Measurement (SSIM). The results show promising performance with strong robustness of watermark information ownership for many intentional and non-intentional attacks, in addition to precise detection of localized modified areas on tampered DEM.