Reversible DNA Watermarking Technique Using Histogram Shifting for Bio-Security

Abstract

Reversible DNA watermarking is capable of continuous DNA storage and forgery prevention, and has the advantage of being able to analyze biological mutation processes by external watermarking by iterative process of concealment and restoration. In this paper, we propose a reversible DNA watermarking method based on histogram multiple shifting of noncoding DNA sequence that can prevent false start codon, maintain original sequence length, maintain high watermark capacity without biologic mutation. The proposed method transforms the non-coding region DNA sequence to the n-th code coefficients and embeds the multiple bits of the n-th code coefficients by the non-recursive histogram multiple shifting method. The multi-bit embedding process prevents the false start codon generation through comparison search between adjacent concealed nucleotide sequences. From the experimental results, it was confirmed that the proposed method has higher watermark capacity of 0.004-0.382 bpn than the conventional method and has higher watermark capacity than the additional data. Also, it was confirmed that false start codon was not generated unlike the conventional method.