【正文】 Digital Signal Processing 20 (2020) 442–453Contents lists available at ScienceDirectDigital Signal ProcessingA novel CRTbased watermarking technique for authenticationof multimedia contentsJagdish C. Patraa,?,a, Cedric BornandbaSchool of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, SingaporebHEIGVD, University of Applied Sciences, YverdonlesBains, Switzerlandarticle info abstractArticle history:Available online 28 July 2020Keywords:Digital watermarkingChinese remainder theoremSingular value depositionDigital watermarking techniques have been proposed as a solution to the problem ofcopyright protection of multimedia data. In this paper, we propose a novel Chineseremainder theorem (CRT)based technique for digital watermarking. The use of CRTfor this purpose provides additional security along with resistance to some familiarattacks. We have shown that this technique is quite resilient to addition of the noise.We have pared performance of the proposed technique with recently reported twosingular value deposition (SVD)based watermarking techniques and shown its superiorperformance in terms of tampering assessment function (TAF), putational e?ciencyand peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). For example, the embedding time of the proposedCRTbased scheme is 6 and 3 times faster than the SVDbased Schemes 1 and 2,respectively. This technique can also be applied to document, audio and video contents.169。 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.1. IntroductionToday’s information driven economy is dominated by the tremendous growth of the Inter and explosion of daytodaydata processing with huge amount of multimedia data. Easy availability of contentediting software, mobile and pactdigital devices and the Inter, make the digital lifestyle of mon man quite different from that of few years ago. Digitalmultimedia contents, ., text, image, video and audio, can be easily altered, stored or transmitted to any point of the globeinstantly. However, multimedia digital content owners are skeptical of putting their content on the Inter due to lack ofintellectual property protection available to them. In order to address this situation, digital watermarking is indeed one ofthe solutions to protect the ownership of these contents. In digital watermarking techniques, some digital signature thatis unique to the owner or copyright information is embedded into the host multimedia content. The signature embeddedremains invisible and imperceptible and cannot be removed easily even under certain manipulations, ., addition of noise,pression, tampering and scaling operations. Only the authorized recipient of the digital content can extract the watermark from the watermarked content with the knowledge of some key information. In this way security, content integrityand intellectual protection can be provided to the owner. In this direction, starting from mid1990, several researchers havereported many watermarking techniques in spatial and transform domains [1–3].Some important properties of an effective watermarking scheme are [1–3]: (i) imperceptibility: there should not be anynoticeable difference between a watermarked content and the original, (ii) robustness: the embedded watermark should beable to withstand to some extent of content manipulation. Any attempt to destroy a watermark should also void the watermarked content and (iii) trustworthiness: no other watermark other than the embedded watermark should be extracted*Corresponding author.Email addresses: (. Patra), (A. Karthik), (C. Bornand).10512020/$ – see front matter 169。 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:. Patra et al. / Digital Signal Processing 20 (2020) 442–453 443from the watermarked content. This is to reduce ambiguity on the ownership of the content. Unfortunately, it is impracticable to design a technique, which features all the above mentioned qualities simultaneously. Therefore, it would be necessaryto make tradeoffs on some of these qualities.Based on the application and methods used, different types of watermarking techniques were exist.? Fragile/Robust watermark. A fragile watermark authenticates images and documents. Such a scheme identifies and locateschanges in the watermarked content. The robust watermark is different because it is integrated into the content and issupposed to be resistant to attacks.? Blind, Semiblind, Nonblind scheme. A blind scheme requires only a key for extraction of the watermark, where as ina semiblind scheme, more information is required such as the watermark. Lastly, for the nonblind scheme, the hostimage is also needed for the extraction of the watermark.The research in watermarking techniques covers a very wide area [1–3]. Many different techniques have been devised using cryptography and quantizationbased embedding to improve security [4,5], discrete cosine transformation [6,7] to makeuse of properties in the frequency domain, and error control codes [8] to increase robustness. An independent ponentanalysisbased blind watermarking technique with interesting results has been proposed in [9]. Many published schemesrely on similar principles or approaches, but they differ in their implementation methodology. Recently few singular valuedeposition (SVD)based elegant watermarking techniques have been proposed in [10–15].In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking technique based on Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). The CRT hasbeen used in several engineering problems, such as hierarchical access control by assigning cryptographic keys [16], secretsharing of stegoimages [17], construction of quasicyclic codes [18], residue number systems [19] and oblivious data transfermechanism [20]. A CRTbased watermarking scheme with preliminary results has been reported in [21]. However, there arenot many applications of CRT fo