Evaluation of copyright protection schemes for hyperspectral imaging

In this paper we evaluate the performance of several image watermarking schemes applied to hyperspectral imaging. An image watermarking scheme based on JPEG2000 which can be also used to store and manipulate hyperspectral images is also described. Different watermarking schemes are tested in order to determine the suitability of each one for a specific hyperspectral image environment. The impact of classical GIS operations (namely zooming, cropping and compression) on the performance of each watermarking scheme is measured in terms of capacity and robustness. In order to do so, we study several possibilities for watermarking hyperspectral images, as all hyperspectral image bands should be taken into account. We also study the impact of watermarking in image quality, measured as usual by PSNR, but also by the degradation of classification performance. Compression, classification and watermarking are closely related to each other as decisions taken in one subject have a large impact on the others.Our results show that the newcomer JPEG2000 standard is a useful tool for both hyperspectral imaging and copyright protection purposes. The proposed watermarking scheme, which takes advantage of JPEG2000 standard capabilities, can be considered to be robust under the constraints defined by the integration of hyperspectral imaging with geographical information systems. JPEG2000 extensions defined by the standard related to this work are also considered.