A novel reversible watermarking scheme for relational databases protection based on histogram shifting

The watermarking technique can be used to protect the ownership of relational databases by hiding some ownership information into the relational databases. In this paper, a novel robust reversible watermarking scheme for relational database protection is proposed to increase the embedding capacity by developing an improved histogram shifting with binary tree structure and an attribute selection scheme. The iteratively embedded watermarks are utilized by a majority voting mechanism to enhance the robustness of the proposed scheme. In addition, the attribute selection and cell selection are employed to reduce the distortion caused by the watermark embedding. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can provide higher embedding capacity and stronger robustness with low distortion compared with other watermarking schemes for relational databases. ? 2016.EI2266-276