Authenticating topological integrity of process plant models through digital watermarking

Process plant models, which feature their intrinsical complex topological relation, are important industrial art works in the field of Computer-Aided Design (CAD). This paper investigates the topology authentication problem for process plant models. Compared with the widely studied watermarking based geometrical information protection and authentication techniques for traditional mechanical CAD drawings, topology authentication is still in its infancy and offers very interesting potentials for improvements. A semi-fragile watermarking based algorithm is proposed to address this interesting issue in this paper. We encode the topological relation among joint plant components into the watermark bits based on the hamming code. A subset of the model’s connection points are selected as mark points for watermark embedding. Then those topology sensitive watermark bits are embedded into selected mark points via bit substitution. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our approach yields a strong ability in detecting and locating malicious topology attacks while achieves robustness against various non-malicious attacks.