Reversible fragile watermarking for 2-D vector map authentication with localization

A 2-D vector map is very important data in the surveying and mapping fields. It is considered to be content for which verification of integrity and authenticity are urgently required. Several reversible fragile watermarking schemes based on lossless compression presented in the literature guarantee neither exact recovery of the original content nor good tamper localization performance. Using a novel marking technique and a reversible data-hiding method, we propose a scheme that detects and locates malicious attacks with high accuracy while ensuring exact recovery of the original content. In particular, we propose calculating watermarks for each spatial feature group, embedding the watermark in a reversible manner and marking the original location of each feature using interpolated vertices. While the mark of each feature ensures superior accuracy of tamper localization, the reversible data-hiding method provides exact recovery of the original content. Moreover, this paper discusses selecting appropriate embedding parameters to achieve good performance in terms of the tamper localization ability, invisibility, authentication power and security. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme could detect and locate malicious attacks such as vertex/feature modification, vertex addition/deletion, and feature addition/deletion.

► We develop a reversible fragile watermarking scheme for 2-D vector maps.
► Interpolated vertices are exploited to mark the original location of each feature.
► A reversible data-hiding method is used to embed the authentication information.
► Our scheme provides good tamper localization accuracy.