A robust and secure zero-watermarking copyright authentication scheme based on visual cryptography and block G-H feature

Zero-watermarking is a distortion-free technique for copyright protection and has become a research hotspot in the field of digital watermarking. In the face of weak robustness and security of existing schemes, this paper proposes a robust and security zero-watermarking scheme for copyright protection using a combination of Visual Cryptography, LT Code, CRC, Block G-H feature, Arnold and timestamp authority. Firstly, the original image is applied with Visual Cryptography to generate two Visual Cryptography Shares. Then, extract the content feature from all blocks of the combined image by the improved G-H feature extraction scheme. To resist strong attacks, transition matrix is generated according to the relationship between the group feature mean and the overall feature mean. Next, the original watermarking image is encrypted by LT code and CRC. Finally, zero-watermarks are generated according to the transition matrix and encrypted watermarking. To promote security, Logistic mapping, Arnold and Visual cryptography are adopted. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has adequate equalization and visibility as well as strong robustness against various attacks, such as Gaussian noise, Salt and pepper noise, media filtering, JPEG compressing, shearing, rotation and line offsetting. In addition to experimental results, robust theoretical analysis, security theoretical analysis and complexity analysis are presented to demonstrate the comprehensive performance.