Energy-aware adaptive watermarking for real-time image delivery in wireless sensor networks

A secure image transmission mechanism is necessary when malicious intruders intend to access and modify content delivery over wireless networks. To assure data integrity, authentication is required for multimedia data delivered over wireless image sensor networks. Watermarking technique is an effective vehicle to assert and assure the image data authentications. There have been recent works reported on watermarking, but few with the consideration of energy cost in terms of the data communication and processing, which is a key constraint to many embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. Most watermarking systems only target at minimizing watermarked image distortion and increasing robustness at the source coding site for lossy image processing. The watermarked image distortion caused by error-prone wireless environments during transmission has not been fully considered. In this paper, an innovative energy-aware adaptive watermarking scheme for real-time image delivery is proposed in wireless multimedia sensor networks. This new scheme allocates network resource to protect the watermarked image transmission while embedding watermark coding redundancies into the images. Dynamic watermark thresholds are applied to be adaptive to the network condition (packet loss ratio) and the inter-frame correlation is exploited to reduce processing delay. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive watermark system can achieve considerable energy efficiency and assure the data integrity.