A Robust Blind Watermarking Scheme for Ownership Assertion of Multi-band Satellite Images

Satellite images serve as very reliable sources for crucial information of inaccessible areas which incur high costing in their acquisitions. Hence, they must reside with their rightful owners as their mishandling may lead to serious consequences. A robust blind watermarking scheme for multi-band satellite images is proposed in this paper. Ownership information is embedded into cover image via minimum manipulation of pixel values such that the classification results are not much affected. Homogeneity analysis of the cover image is performed to chalk out homogeneous sites for embedding of copyright information. To further enhance the security of the scheme, random chaotic mapping along with convolutional encoding and viterbi decoding and multiple secret keys (four) has been employed. The robustness of the scheme has been tested against comprehensive set of attacks and evaluated using Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) metrics. The comparative results with the other existing state of the art approaches confirm the efficacy of the proposed scheme.