Deep Learning-Based Dual Watermarking for Image Copyright Protection and Authentication

Advancements in digital technologies make it easy to modify the content of digital images. Hence, ensuring digital images’ integrity and authenticity is necessary to protect them against various attacks that manipulate them. We present a deep learning (DL) based dual invisible watermarking technique for performing source authentication, content authentication, and protecting digital content copyright of images sent over the internet. Beyond securing images, the proposed technique demonstrates robustness to content-preserving image manipulation attacks. It is also impossible to imitate or overwrite watermarks because the cryptographic hash of the image and the dominant features of the image in the form of perceptual hash are used as watermarks. We highlighted the need for source authentication to safeguard image integrity and authenticity, along with identifying similar content for copyright protection. After exhaustive testing, our technique obtained a high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM), which implies there is a minute change in the original image after embedding our watermarks. Our trained model achieves high watermark extraction accuracy and satisfies two different objectives of verification and authentication on the same watermarked image.