VLSI architecture and FPGA prototyping of a digital camera for image security and authentication

Two fundamental operations performed by a digital camera are image capturing and storing. The images are subsequently transmitted in various forms over appropriate media. These images are always vulnerable to various forms of copyright attacks and ownership issues. This paper introduces a digital camera with built-in copyright protection and security mechanism for images produced by it. Since the proposal of the trustworthy digital camera by Friedman [1], significant research has been done in developing algorithms for watermarking and encryption with the aim of using them in digital cameras. However, only few of these efforts are involved with the architectural development of the entire digital camera. Incorporation of encryption and watermarking together in the digital camera will assist in protecting and authenticating image files. In this paper, we present an architecture and a hardware efficient FPGA based watermark module towards the development of the complete digital camera.