Open Access
ARTICLE
Joint Watermarking and Encryption for Social Image Sharing
1 School of Information Engineering, Hubei University of Economics, Wuhan, 430205, China
2 School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science & Technology, Changsha, 410114, China
* Corresponding Author: Conghuan Ye. Email:
Computers, Materials & Continua 2025, 83(2), 2927-2946. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2025.062051
Received 09 December 2024; Accepted 07 January 2025; Issue published 16 April 2025
Abstract
With the fast development of multimedia social platforms, content dissemination on social media platforms is becoming more popular. Social image sharing can also raise privacy concerns. Image encryption can protect social images. However, most existing image protection methods cannot be applied to multimedia social platforms because of encryption in the spatial domain. In this work, the authors propose a secure social image-sharing method with watermarking/fingerprinting and encryption. First, the fingerprint code with a hierarchical community structure is designed based on social network analysis. Then, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) from block discrete cosine transform (DCT) directly is employed. After that, all codeword segments are embedded into the LL, LH, and HL subbands, respectively. The selected subbands are confused based on Game of Life (GoL), and then all subbands are diffused with singular value decomposition (SVD). Experimental results and security analysis demonstrate the security, invisibility, and robustness of our method. Further, the superiority of the technique is elaborated through comparison with some related image security algorithms. The solution not only performs the fast transformation from block DCT to one-level DWT but also protects users’ privacy in multimedia social platforms. With the proposed method, JPEG image secure sharing in multimedia social platforms can be ensured.Keywords
Cite This Article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.