A fractal watermark solution for product data

Copyright and integrity protection over product data is becoming an urgent requirement, because in a Distributed Networked Manufacturing environment, enterprises have to interact with each other to share product data. In this paper, we introduce a novel watermarking solution for product data based on the idea of fractal, which classifies product data watermarks into three tiers: fractal watermark, tree-structure watermark, and tree-node watermark. It embeds watermarks not only in value-carrying nodes but also in product structures that "glue" all the nodes together by embedding multiple structure watermarks in product data. Simulation results show that the proposed technique is robust against various forms of malicious attacks of product data, and naturally immune from structure transformation attacks and subtractive (sub-tree) attacks. Moreover, the solution can protect tree-structure data whose knowledge is mainly embodied in the tree structure efficiently. It is very easy to implement and popularize.