Hybridized Hierarchical Watermarking and Selective Encryption for Social Image Security

With the advent of cloud computing and social multimedia communication, more and more social images are being collected on social media platforms, such as Facebook, TikTok, Flirk, and YouTube. The amount of social images produced and disseminated is rapidly increasing. Meanwhile, cloud computing-assisted social media platforms have made social image dissemination more and more efficient. There exists an unstoppable trend of fake/unauthorized social image dissemination. The growth of social image sharing underscores potential security risks for illegal use, such as image forgery, malicious copying, piracy exposure, plagiarism, and misappropriation. Therefore, secure social image dissemination has become urgent and critical on social media platforms. The authors propose a secure scheme for social image dissemination on social media platforms. The main objective is to make a map between the tree structure Haar (TSH) transform and the hierarchical community structure of a social network. First, perform the TSH transform on a social image using social network analysis (SNA). Second, all users in a social media platform are coded using SNA. Third, watermarking and encryption are performed in a compressed domain for protecting social image dissemination. Finally, the encrypted and watermarked contents are delivered to users via a hybrid multicast-unicast scheme. The use of encryption along with watermarking can provide double protection for social image dissemination. The theory analysis and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.