Watermarking, which belong to the information hiding field, has seen a lot of research interest. There is a lot of work begin conducted in different branches in this field. Steganography is used for secret communication, whereas watermarking is used for content protection, copyright management, content authentication and tamper detection. In this paper we present a detailed survey of existing and newly proposed steganographic and watermarking techniques. We classify the techniques based on different domains in which data is embedded. We limit the survey to images only.

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A survey of digital image watermarking techniques

This paper presents a novel blind watermarking algorithm in DCT domain using the correlation between two DCT coefficients of adjacent blocks in the same position. One DCT coefficient of each block is modified to bring the difference from the adjacent block coefficient in a specified range. The value used to modify the coefficient is obtained by finding difference between DC and median of a few low frequency AC coefficients and the result is normalized by DC coefficient. The proposed watermarking algorithm is tested for different attacks. It shows very good robustness under JPEG image compression as compared to existing one and also good quality of watermark is extracted by performing other common image processing operations like cropping, rotation, brightening, sharpening, contrast enhancement etc.

A novel blind robust image watermarking in DCT domain using inter-block coefficient correlation

With the rapid development of computer science, problems with digital products piracy and copyright dispute become more serious; therefore, it is an urgent task to find solutions for these problems. In this study, the authors' develop a digital watermarking algorithm based on a fractal encoding method and the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The proposed method combines fractal encoding method and DCT method for double encryptions to improve traditional DCT method. The image is encoded by fractal encoding as the first encryption, and then encoded parameters are used in DCT method as the second encryption. First, the fractal encoding method is adopted to encode a private image with private scales. Encoding parameters are applied as digital watermarking. Then, digital watermarking is added to the original image to reversibly using DCT, which means the authors can extract the private image from the carrier image with private encoding scales. Finally, attacking experiments are carried out on the carrier image by using several attacking methods. Experimental results show that the presented method has higher performance characteristics such as robustness and peak signal to noise ratio than classical methods.

https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1049/iet-ipr.2016.0862

Digital image watermarking method based on DCT and fractal encoding

The increasing popularity of the internet means that digital multimedia are transmitted more rapidly and easily. And people are very aware for media ownership. However, digital watermarking is an efficient and promising means to protect intellectual properties. Based on the intellectual property attention in the information era, how to protect the personal ownership is extremely important and a necessary scheme. In this paper, we propose an effective video watermarking method based on a pseudo-3-D discrete cosine transform (DCT) and quantization index modulation (QIM) against several attacks. The watermark is mainly inserted into the uncompressed domain by adjusting the correlation between DCT coefficients of the selected blocks, and the watermark extraction is blind. This approach consists of a pseudo-3-D DCT, watermark embedding, and extraction. A pseudo-3-D DCT, which is taken DCT transformation twice, will be first utilized to calculate the embedding factor and to obtain the useful messages. Using the QIM, we embed the watermark into the quantization regions from the successive raw frames in the uncompressed domain and record the relative information to create a secret embedding key. This secret embedding key will further apply to extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can survive filtering, compressions, luminance change, and noise attacks with a good invisibility and robustness.

A Video Watermarking Technique Based on Pseudo-3-D DCT and Quantization Index Modulation

Since all the multimedia products are released via internet so it’s an urgent need today to protect the data from malicious attacks. This lead to the research in the area of Digital watermarking which intends to protect the copyright information of the intellectuals. In this paper a DCT based watermarking scheme is proposed which provides higher resistance to image processing attacks such as JPEG compression, noise, rotation, translation etc .In this approach, the watermark is embedded in the mid frequency band of the DCT blocks carrying low frequency components and the high frequency sub band components remain unused. Watermark is inserted by adjusting the DCT coefficients of the image and by using the private key. Watermark can then be extracted using the same private key without resorting to the original image. Performance analysis shows that the watermark is robust.

Steganographic approach for hiding image in dct domain

In recent years, digital watermarking techniques have been proposed to protect the copyright of multimedia data. Different watermarking schemes have been suggested for images. The goal of this paper is to develop a watermarking algorithm based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and image segmentation. The image is first segmented in different portions based on the Voronoi diagram and features extraction points. Then, a pseudorandom sequence of real numbers is embedded in the DCT domain of each image segment. Different experiments are conducted to show the performance of the scheme under different types of attacks. The results show that our proposed watermark scheme is robust to common signal distortions, including geometric manipulations. The robustness against Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression is achieved for a compression ratio of up to 45, and robustness against average, median, and Wiener filters is shown for the 3/spl times/3 up to 9/spl times/9 pixel neighborhood. It is observed that robustness against scaling was achieved when the watermarked image size is scaled down to 0.4% of its original size.

M.A. Suhail

Papers

Digital watermarking-based DCT and JPEG model