Secure communication and archiving of low altitude remote sensing data using high capacity fragile data hiding

Fragile data hiding has been extensively used for secure transmission of the sensitive data using cover images, audios and videos. In the past decade, increasingly the remote sensing applications require transmission and archiving of large number of aerial images and videos. Storage and processing of remote sensing data in the public cloud computing and storage platforms, with servers outside the control of the data owners, requires sufficient attention to persevering the privacy of the data. Furthermore, in the past few years the applications of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles demand algorithms designed especially for low altitude remote sensing data. In this paper, a novel fragile data hiding algorithm for secure transmission and archiving of sensitive data in low altitude aerial videos is presented. The proposed method incorporates Integer-to-Integer discrete wavelet transform and lattice vector quantization to present a high capacity data hiding algorithm. The fragility of the proposed algorithm results in the loss of the embedded authentication credential by any tampering attempt. The experimental results show that the proposed fragile data hiding algorithm is capable of hiding significantly higher amount of data in the aerial videos compared to other existing algorithms while keeping the perceptual quality of the cover media in an acceptable range.