The digital image data transmission and storage in today’s cyberspace has increase with privacy and security concerns. Digital media collected from different sources such as surveillance systems, forensic databases, medical images are very sensitive hence security concerns regarding the safe transmission and authentication of such digital data across secured and unsecured communication channels needs to be addressed. This security to such images should be easily used to identify the source, detect modification and secure the content of the image as well as avoiding pixel loss during the original image recovery process. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid image cryptographic encryption and digital watermarking technique for the encryption and authentication of digital image content. The image encryption was done on the RGB channels and the spatial watermarking was successfully applied to the RGB-colour bands of the digital image and this rendered the watermark visibly subtle and difficult to detect under regular viewing. The digital watermarking technique was engaged to authenticate the image and detect modifications to the watermarked image. The watermark visibility and detection was difficult to detect and the image was successfully reconstructed without any loss of pixel value after decryption. The programming and implementation was done using MATLAB. Keywords- Cryptography, digital image, Encryption, Watermarking, pixel, authentication

Abstract

The digital image data transmission and storage in today’s cyberspace has increase with privacy and security concerns. Digital media collected from different sources such as surveillance systems, forensic databases, medical images are very sensitive hence security concerns regarding the safe transmission and authentication of such digital data across secured and unsecured communication channels needs to be addressed. This security to such images should be easily used to identify the source, detect modification and secure the, content of the image as well as avoiding pixel loss during the original image recovery process. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid image cryptographic encryption and digital watermarking technique for the encryption and authentication of digital image content. The image encryption was done on the RGB channels and the spatial watermarking was successfully applied to the RGB-colour bands of the digital image and this rendered the watermark visibly subtle and difficult to detect under regular viewing. The digital watermarking technique was engaged to authenticate the image and detect modifications to the watermarked image. The watermark visibility and detection was difficult to detect and the image was successfully reconstructed without any loss of pixel value after decryption. The programming and implementation was done using MATLAB