Content security protection for remote sensing images integrating selective content encryption and digital fingerprint

Content security protection methods should be adopted to guarantee the security of highly sensitive remote sensing images during their transmission and usage. The joint fingerprinting and decryption (JFD) framework, which integrates encryption and fingerprinting, can provide comprehensive, effective content security protection for remote sensing information. However, several challenges need to be overcome. In order to solve the contradictory relationship between encryption security and fingerprinted image quality in JFD, a selective content encryption strategy is proposed to enhance encryption security and a new method for choosing fingerprint embedding area is proposed to reduce partial decryption's influence on image quality. Furthermore, a new method for generating and controlling fingerprints is introduced to JFD to eliminate its vulnerability to collusion attacks. The experiment results show that the proposed techniques are highly effective. Because of its high security, good fingerprinted image quality and high data processing and transmission speed, the new JFD scheme is an effective content security protection approach for remote sensing images, especially suitable for massive remote sensing images. (C) 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.JRS.6.063505]