Norishige Morimoto

Secure digital photograph handling with watermarking technique in insurance claim process

This paper presents a secure method to handle digital photographs in insurance claim process. It consists of: Device authentication by secure protocol capable to protect photographs from substitution, Watermarking technique to embed digital signatures on JPEG data and detect altered portions, and Robust watermarking technique to embed image identification number which persists throughout decompression/compression operations. The device authentication is used in transmissions of photograph images from a digital camera (DC) to a compact flash memory (CF), and from a CF to a personal computer (PC). Thus images are authenticated at the one-way pass of DC, CF and PC. In registering images on PC, an image identification number and a digital signature are embedded into a JPEG data stream by a watermarking technique called DataHidingTM. We could imbed 96 bits of data into a 640 X 480 pixel image without degrading visual image quality and persistency of embedding data. After the watermarking process, a photograph can be identified by decoding an embedded number and detected any altered portion by an embedded signature. Using the new method, we have developed a prototype secure claim process, and verified the feasibility of the method at field trials.