Communication-resource-aware adaptive watermarking for multimedia authentication in wireless multimedia sensor networks

Efficient multimedia and specifically image authentication is critical and in demand to protect data vulnerability in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN). This is to prevent malicious intruders from modifying and forging image contents over a network. Watermarking technique has been widely used to assert an image data authentication over wired networks; however, resource constraints (e.g. processing power, communication energy) in small sensors and the state of error-prone wireless channels result in fundamental challenges for developing efficient watermarking schemes in WMSN. These challenges include how to embed/protect/extract watermark efficiently and robustly in low-cost sensors and how to transmit authenticated image and multimedia with high energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a communication-resource-aware and adaptive watermarking scheme for multimedia authentication in WMSN. Our contribution is two folds. First, the transmission quality for the watermark as well as watermarked multimedia authenticity by embedding watermark with adaptive coding redundancies, and by unequally allocating network resources to protect the image and multimedia packets with the watermark information. Second, communication energy efficiency and real time performance are achieved with the watermark being adaptive to the network condition and the processing delay reduced due to the exploited inter-frame correlation. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive watermarking system can achieve considerable gains in terms of energy saving, image transmission quality and multimedia authentication performance.