This survey presents a brief discussion of different aspects of digital image watermarking. Included in the present discussion are these general concepts: major characteristics of digital watermark, novel and recent applications of watermarking, different kinds of watermarking techniques and common watermark embedding and extraction process. In addition, recent state-of-art watermarking techniques, potential issues and available solutions are discussed in brief. Further, the performance summary of the various state-of-art watermarking techniques is presented in tabular format. This survey contribution will be useful for the researchers to implement efficient watermarking techniques for secure e-governance applications.

A recent survey on image watermarking techniques and its application in e-governance

An evolutionary programming approach for securing medical images using watermarking scheme in invariant discrete wavelet transformation

The widespread application of the Internet makes the protection of image copyright face serious challenges. For resolving this problem, this paper designs a blind color digital image watermarking algorithm which meets the requirements of invisibility, security and robustness. The advantages of the proposed method include the following two points: 1) the proposed method uses Affine transformation with large key space to encrypt the watermark information; 2) Schur decomposition with low complexity is selected and performed on the matrix blocks in different color channels of the host image. In this proposed method, the watermark embedding and blind extraction are completed by quantizing the eigenvalues on the diagonal of the decomposed matrix with different quantization steps. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only has good invisibility, but also has high security and strong robustness.

A blind color image watermarking scheme with variable steps based on Schur decomposition

To protect the ownership of the digital products, a novel adaptive and blind watermarking scheme is designed. Firstly, the underlying reason of image quality degradation in singular value decomposition (SVD)-based watermarking scheme is analyzed and the potential scenario causing visible destroy is pointed out. Then the optimal SVD blocks selection strategy is proposed to improve the imperceptibility. Different from other block selection rules devised by subjective evaluation means, our selection rule aims to retain the image quality as much as possible from the source. Furthermore, information entropy is utilized to achieve the purpose of adaptive embedding. In the experiment, the proposed watermarking scheme is tested under several attacks, such as noise attack, JPEG compression, blurring, sharping, and etc. Finally, the proposed watermarking scheme is compared with other existing schemes, and the experimental results demonstrate the robustness, imperceptibility and superior of the proposed watermarking scheme.

Adaptive and blind watermarking scheme based on optimal SVD blocks selection

More than ever, the practical and accurate watermarking technologies are called for the growing amount of exchanged digital image over the Internet. To protect the integrity and authenticity of digital image and to enhance the effect of tamper detection and restoration, we design and implement a semi-fragile watermark based on cat transformation, mostly used to locate tamper and recover for the transformed image and plain-image. The watermark which consists of two parts: the authentication watermark and recovery watermark, is embedded into the 2 least significant bit (LSB) of the pixel of the original image. The authentication watermark is calculated by the pixel value comparison and the parity check code, while the recovery watermark contains the average pixel value of the Torus image block. In the detection side, we use the hierarchy concept to locate the tamper in three layers and recover the attacked image in two layers. By using the hierarchy concept, this algorithm has another superiority that tamper can be detected on confused image. The experimental results show that our algorithm can accurately locate tamper and realize the content recovery and effectively prevent the vector quantization attack. Compared with other algorithms, this algorithm has better effect of tamper location and recovery.

A Novel Semi-fragile Digital Watermarking Scheme for Scrambled Image Authentication and Restoration

A novel watermarking scheme is proposed that could substantially improve current watermarking techniques This scheme exploits the features of micro images of watermarks to build association rules and embeds the rules into a host image instead of the bit stream of the watermark, which is commonly used in digital watermarking Next, similar micro images with the same rules are collected or even created from the host image to simulate an extracted watermark This method, called the features classification forest, can achieve blind extraction and is adaptable to any watermarking scheme using a quantization-based mechanism Furthermore, a larger size watermark can be accepted without an adverse effect on the imperceptibility of the host image The experiments demonstrate the successful simulation of watermarks and the application to five different watermarking schemes One of them is slightly adjusted from a reference to especially resist JPEG compression, and the others show native advantages to resist different image processing attacks

Chia-Sung Chang

Papers

Features Classification Forest: A Novel Development that is Adaptable to Robust Blind Watermarking Techniques