Cryptanalysis and improvement of a binary watermark-based copyright protection scheme for remote sensing images

The copyright protection of the remote sensing images is becoming a hot research topic in recent years. By considering the characteristics of the binary image, Zhu et al. proposed a new digital watermarking algorithm to protect the copyright of remote sensing images effectively. However, Zhu et al.'s scheme is not secure under the novel attack method proposed in this paper. While keeping the visual quality of the protected original image unchanged, the embedded watermark can be replaced with another watermark if the attacker has the host image carrying the other watermark. Thus the copyright of the original image changes and the copyright protection fail. To overcome the insecurity, a chaos-based improvement measure is proposed, in which the performance is the same as before. Analysis, proof, and experiment show that our methods are feasible and effective.