Showing papers on "Digital watermarking published in 2011"
TL;DR: This work proposes a novel reversible data hiding scheme for encrypted image, where the additional data can be embedded into the image by modifying a small proportion of encrypted data.
Abstract: This work proposes a novel reversible data hiding scheme for encrypted image. After encrypting the entire data of an uncompressed image by a stream cipher, the additional data can be embedded into the image by modifying a small proportion of encrypted data. With an encrypted image containing additional data, one may firstly decrypt it using the encryption key, and the decrypted version is similar to the original image. According to the data-hiding key, with the aid of spatial correlation in natural image, the embedded data can be successfully extracted and the original image can be perfectly recovered.
768 citations
TL;DR: The PEE technique is further investigated and an efficient reversible watermarking scheme is proposed, by incorporating in PEE two new strategies, namely, adaptive embedding and pixel selection, which outperforms conventional PEE.
Abstract: Prediction-error expansion (PEE) is an important technique of reversible watermarking which can embed large payloads into digital images with low distortion. In this paper, the PEE technique is further investigated and an efficient reversible watermarking scheme is proposed, by incorporating in PEE two new strategies, namely, adaptive embedding and pixel selection. Unlike conventional PEE which embeds data uniformly, we propose to adaptively embed 1 or 2 bits into expandable pixel according to the local complexity. This avoids expanding pixels with large prediction-errors, and thus, it reduces embedding impact by decreasing the maximum modification to pixel values. Meanwhile, adaptive PEE allows very large payload in a single embedding pass, and it improves the capacity limit of conventional PEE. We also propose to select pixels of smooth area for data embedding and leave rough pixels unchanged. In this way, compared with conventional PEE, a more sharply distributed prediction-error histogram is obtained and a better visual quality of watermarked image is observed. With these improvements, our method outperforms conventional PEE. Its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods is also demonstrated experimentally.
530 citations
TL;DR: This paper aims at reducing the embedding distortion of prediction error expansion reversible watermarking by tuning the amount of data embedded into context pixels.
Abstract: This paper aims at reducing the embedding distortion of prediction error expansion reversible watermarking. Instead of embedding the entire expanded difference into the current pixel, the difference is split between the current pixel and its prediction context. The modification of the context generates an increase of the following prediction errors. Global optimization is obtained by tuning the amount of data embedded into context pixels. Prediction error expansion reversible watermarking schemes based on median edge detector (MED), gradient-adjusted predictor (GAP), and a simplified GAP version, SGAP, are investigated. Improvements are obtained for all the predictors. Notably good results are obtained for SGAP-based schemes. The improved SGAP appears to outperform GAP-based reversible watermarking.
282 citations
TL;DR: An improved SVD-based watermarking technique considering human visual characteristics is presented and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the proposed approach is able to withstand a variety of image processing attacks.
168 citations
TL;DR: A robust digital image watermarking scheme based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and a tiny genetic algorithm (Tiny-GA) and Experimental results demonstrate that the scheme is able to withstand a variety of image processing attacks.
167 citations
TL;DR: Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method is comparable to, if not, better than SVD based method and several selected typical audioWatermarking methods, even in the presence of various common signal processing attacks.
160 citations
TL;DR: The lower the tampering rate, the more levels of content data are recovered, and the better the quality of restored results.
Abstract: This paper proposes two novel self-embedding watermarking schemes based upon a reference sharing mechanism, in which the watermark to be embedded is a reference derived from the original principal content in different regions and shared by these regions for content restoration. After identifying tampered blocks, both the reference data and the original content in the reserved area are used to recover the principal content in the tampered area. By using the first scheme, the original data in five most significant bit layers of a cover image can be recovered and the original watermarked image can also be retrieved when the content replacement is not too extensive. In the second scheme, the host content is decomposed into three levels, and the reference sharing methods with different restoration capabilities are employed to protect the data at different levels. Therefore, the lower the tampering rate, the more levels of content data are recovered, and the better the quality of restored results.
151 citations
23 Oct 2011
TL;DR: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LWT-SVD method is not only robust to both general signal processing and desynchronization attacks but also outperform the selected previous studies.
Abstract: In this paper, a new and robust audio watermarking scheme based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. Specifically, the watermark data is inserted in the LWT coefficients of the low frequency subband taking advantage of SVD and quantization index modulation (QIM). The use of QIM renders our scheme blind in nature. Furthermore, the synchronization code technique is also integrated with hybrid LWT-SVD audio watermarking. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LWT-SVD method is not only robust to both general signal processing and desynchronization attacks but also outperform the selected previous studies.
143 citations
TL;DR: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed chaos based watermarking scheme is not only secure but also achieves superior tamper detection and localization accuracy under different attacks.
Abstract: In the past few years, various fragile watermarking techniques have been proposed for image authentication and tamper detection. In this paper, a novel chaos based watermarking scheme for image authentication and tamper detection is proposed. Tamper localization and detection accuracy are two important aspects of the authentication watermarking schemes. Our scheme can detect any modification made to the image and can also indicate the specific locations that have been modified. To improve the security of the proposed scheme two chaotic maps are employed. Since chaotic maps are sensitive to initial values, the corresponding position relation between pixels in the watermarked image and the watermark get disturbed, which helps the watermarking scheme to withstand counterfeiting attacks. Initial values of the chaotic maps are used as secret keys in our scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is checked through a series of attacks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is not only secure but also achieves superior tamper detection and localization accuracy under different attacks. For instance in copy-and-paste attack and collage attack.
142 citations
TL;DR: The commutative property of the proposed method allows to cipher a watermarked image without interfering with the embedded signal or to watermark an encrypted image still allowing a perfect deciphering.
Abstract: In this paper a commutative watermarking and ciphering scheme for digital images is presented. The commutative property of the proposed method allows to cipher a watermarked image without interfering with the embedded signal or to watermark an encrypted image still allowing a perfect deciphering. Both operations are performed on a parametric transform domain: the Tree Structured Haar transform. The key dependence of the adopted transform domain increases the security of the overall system. In fact, without the knowledge of the generating key it is not possible to extract any useful information from the ciphered-watermarked image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
136 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms previous techniques in general and the smaller the tampered area, the more available watermark data will result in a better quality of recovered content.
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel watermarking scheme with flexible self-recovery quality. The embedded watermark data for content recovery are calculated from the original discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of host image and do not contain any additional redundancy. When a part of a watermarked image is tampered, the watermark data in the area without any modification still can be extracted. If the amount of extracted data is large, we can reconstruct the original coefficients in the tampered area according to the constraints given by the extracted data. Otherwise, we may employ a compressive sensing technique to retrieve the coefficients by exploiting the sparseness in the DCT domain. This way, all the extracted watermark data contribute to the content recovery. The smaller the tampered area, the more available watermark data will result in a better quality of recovered content. It is also shown that the proposed scheme outperforms previous techniques in general.
TL;DR: The experimental results show the ability of hiding patient’s data with a very good visual quality, while ROI, the most important area for diagnosis, is retrieved exactly at the receiver side, and the scheme shows some robustness against certain levels of salt and pepper and cropping noise.
Abstract: Authenticating medical images using watermarking techniques has become a very popular area of research, and some works in this area have been reported worldwide recently. Besides authentication, many data-hiding techniques have been proposed to conceal patient’s data into medical images aiming to reduce the cost needed to store data and the time needed to transmit data when required. In this paper, we present a new hybrid watermarking scheme for DICOM images. In our scheme, two well-known techniques are combined to gain the advantages of both and fulfill the requirements of authentication and data hiding. The scheme divides the images into two parts, the region of interest (ROI) and the region of non-interest (RONI). Patient’s data are embedded into ROI using a reversible technique based on difference expansion, while tamper detection and recovery data are embedded into RONI using a robust technique based on discrete wavelet transform. The experimental results show the ability of hiding patient’s data with a very good visual quality, while ROI, the most important area for diagnosis, is retrieved exactly at the receiver side. The scheme also shows some robustness against certain levels of salt and pepper and cropping noise.
TL;DR: It is shown that, the watermark embedding procedure comes to get better normalized correlation (NC) factor by modifying singular values, and this method is robust against several attacks such as: noise addition, filtering, histogram equalization, gamma correction, JPEG compression, scaling and rotation.
Abstract: A hybrid robust digital watermarking algorithm based on finite Radon transform (FRAT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is proposed and simulated. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is popularly used as it possesses properties similar to the human visual system (HVS). We will show that, the watermark embedding procedure comes to get better normalized correlation (NC) factor by modifying singular values. Trade off robustness and transparence of digital watermarking is done by using middle frequencies of HL3 and LH3. Experimental results demonstrate that this method is robust against several attacks such as: noise addition, filtering, histogram equalization, gamma correction, JPEG compression, scaling and rotation.
TL;DR: This paper proposes a new watermarking approach which allows watermark detection and extraction under affine transformation attacks and stands on a set of affine invariants derived from Legendre moments.
Abstract: Geometric distortions are generally simple and effective attacks for many watermarking methods. They can make detection and extraction of the embedded watermark difficult or even impossible by destroying the synchronization between the watermark reader and the embedded watermark. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking approach which allows watermark detection and extraction under affine transformation attacks. The novelty of our approach stands on a set of affine invariants we derived from Legendre moments. Watermark embedding and detection are directly performed on this set of invariants. We also show how these moments can be exploited for estimating the geometric distortion parameters in order to permit watermark extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is robust to a wide range of attacks: geometric distortion, filtering, compression, and additive noise.
TL;DR: Besides the usual requirement of mutual orthogonality among reference patterns for multiple watermark embedding, it is found that proper embedding order plays an even more important role in watermarking the DIBR 3D images.
Abstract: The content protection for image-based 3D data is getting more importance with the advance of low cost 3D display devices. The depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) 3D image is one of the image-based 3D data which consists of the center image and the depth image generated by the content provider. The left-eye image and the right-eye image are rendered from the center image and the depth image at the content consumer side. The blind watermarking for DIBR 3D image is rarely studied in the literature. In this paper, a novel blind multiple watermarking scheme is proposed to deal with the content protection problem of DIBR 3D images. Besides the usual requirement of mutual orthogonality among reference patterns for multiple watermark embedding, we found that proper embedding order plays an even more important role in watermarking the DIBR 3D images. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against the JPEG compression and noise adding attacks. More interestingly, it is found that the proposed watermarking can also tolerate large range variations of the depth image during rendering.
TL;DR: Experimental results show that the proposed GDWM outperforms other watermarking methods and is robust to a wide range of attacks, e.g., Gaussian filtering, amplitude scaling, median filtering, sharpening, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt & pepper noise, and scaling.
Abstract: We propose a robust quantization-based image watermarking scheme, called the gradient direction watermarking (GDWM), based on the uniform quantization of the direction of gradient vectors. In GDWM, the watermark bits are embedded by quantizing the angles of significant gradient vectors at multiple wavelet scales. The proposed scheme has the following advantages: 1) increased invisibility of the embedded watermark because the watermark is embedded in significant gradient vectors, 2) robustness to amplitude scaling attacks because the watermark is embedded in the angles of the gradient vectors, and 3) increased watermarking capacity as the scheme uses multiple-scale embedding. The gradient vector at a pixel is expressed in terms of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients. To quantize the gradient direction, the DWT coefficients are modified based on the derived relationship between the changes in the coefficients and the change in the gradient direction. Experimental results show that the proposed GDWM outperforms other watermarking methods and is robust to a wide range of attacks, e.g., Gaussian filtering, amplitude scaling, median filtering, sharpening, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt & pepper noise, and scaling.
TL;DR: A watermarking method, which minimizes the impact of the watermark implementation on the overall quality of an image, is developed using a peak signal-to-noise ratio to evaluate quality degradation.
Abstract: In this paper, we evaluate the degradation of an image due to the implementation of a watermark in the frequency domain of the image. As a result, a watermarking method, which minimizes the impact of the watermark implementation on the overall quality of an image, is developed. The watermark is embedded in magnitudes of the Fourier transform. A peak signal-to-noise ratio is used to evaluate quality degradation. The obtained results were used to develop a watermarking strategy that chooses the optimal radius of the implementation to minimize quality degradation. The robustness of the proposed method was evaluated on the dataset of 1000 images. Detection rates and receiver operating characteristic performance showed considerable robustness against the print-scan process, print-cam process, amplitude modulated, halftoning, and attacks from the StirMark benchmark software.
TL;DR: A fully reversible, dual-layer watermarking scheme with tamper detection capability for medical images that utilizes concepts of public-key cryptography and reversible data-hiding technique is presented.
Abstract: Teleradiology applications and universal availability of patient records using web-based technology are rapidly gaining importance. Consequently, digital medical image security has become an important issue when images and their pertinent patient information are transmitted across public networks, such as the Internet. Health mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act require healthcare providers to adhere to security measures in order to protect sensitive patient information. This paper presents a fully reversible, dual-layer watermarking scheme with tamper detection capability for medical images. The scheme utilizes concepts of public-key cryptography and reversible data-hiding technique. The scheme was tested using medical images in DICOM format. The results show that the scheme is able to ensure image authenticity and integrity, and to locate tampered regions in the images.
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: A new optimal watermarking scheme based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) using multi-objective ant colony optimization (MOACO) is presented.
Abstract: In this paper, a new optimal watermarking scheme based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) using multi-objective ant colony optimization (MOACO) is presented. The singular values of the binary water- mark are embedded in a detail subband of host image. To achieve the highest possible robustness without losing watermark transparency, multiple scaling factors (MSF) are used instead of a single scaling factor (SSF). Determining the optimal values of the mul- tiple scaling factors (MSF) is a dicult problem. However, to determine these values, a multi-objective ant colony-based optimization method is used. Experimental results show much improved performances in terms of transparency and robustness for the proposed method compared to other watermarking schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme does not suer from the problem of high probability of false positive detections of the watermarks.
TL;DR: A new audio watermarking algorithm based on singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization is presented that is quite robust against attacks including additive white Gaussian noise, MP3 compression, resampling, low-pass filtering, requantization, cropping, echo addition and denoising.
Abstract: Quantization index modulation is one of the best methods for performing blind watermarking, due to its simplicity and good rate-distortion-robustness trade-offs. In this paper, a new audio watermarking algorithm based on singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization is presented. The watermark is embedded using dither-modulation quantization of the singular values of the blocks of the host audio signal. The watermark can be blindly extracted without the knowledge of the original audio signal. Subjective and objective tests confirm high imperceptibility achieved by the proposed scheme. Moreover, the scheme is quite robust against attacks including additive white Gaussian noise, MP3 compression, resampling, low-pass filtering, requantization, cropping, echo addition and denoising. The watermark data payload of the algorithm is 196 bps. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme shows low error probability rates.
TL;DR: Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed audio watermarking scheme is not only resilient against common signal processing operations, but also has conquered the challenging audio geometric distortion and achieves the best robustness against simultaneous geometric distortions.
Abstract: The development of a geometric invariant audio watermarking scheme without degrading acoustical quality is challenging work. This paper proposes a multi-bit spread-spectrum audio watermarking scheme based on a geometric invariant log coordinate mapping (LCM) feature. The LCM feature is very robust to audio geometric distortions. The watermark is embedded in the LCM feature, but it is actually embedded in the Fourier coefficients which are mapped to the feature via LCM, so the embedding is actually performed in the DFT domain without interpolation, thus eliminating completely the severe distortion resulted from the non-uniform interpolation mapping. The watermarked audio achieves high auditory quality in both objective and subjective quality assessments. A mixed correlation between the LCM feature and a key-generated PN tracking sequence is proposed to align the log-coordinate mapping, thus synchronizing the watermark efficiently with only one FFT and one IFFT. Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed audio watermarking scheme is not only resilient against common signal processing operations, including low-pass filtering, MP3 recompression, echo addition, volume change, normalization, test functions in the Stirmark benchmark, and DA/AD conversion, but also has conquered the challenging audio geometric distortion and achieves the best robustness against simultaneous geometric distortions, such as pitch invariant time-scale modification (TSM) by ±20%, tempo invariant pitch shifting by 20%, resample TSM with scaling factors between 75% and 140%, and random cropping by 95%. This is mainly contributed by the proposed geometric invariant LCM feature. To our best knowledge, audio watermarking based on LCM has not been reported before.
TL;DR: A mechanism of block classification is used to compress the original image according to the DCT coefficients, in which blocks corresponding to different types are encoded to variable lengths, to provide improved restoration capability.
TL;DR: The experimental results show that the proposed semi-fragile watermarking scheme outperforms four peer schemes and is capable of identifying intentional tampering and incidental modification, and localizing tampered regions.
TL;DR: This paper proposes a correlation-and-bit-aware concept for data hiding by exploiting the side information at the encoder side, and presents two improved data hiding approaches based on the popular additive spread spectrum embedding idea.
Abstract: This paper proposes a correlation-and-bit-aware concept for data hiding by exploiting the side information at the encoder side, and we present two improved data hiding approaches based on the popular additive spread spectrum embedding idea. We first propose the correlation-aware spread spectrum (CASS) embedding scheme, which is shown to provide better watermark decoding performance than the traditional additive spread spectrum (SS) scheme. Further, we propose the correlation-aware improved spread spectrum (CAISS) embedding scheme by incorporating SS, improved spread spectrum (ISS), and the proposed correlation-and-bit-aware concept. Compared with the traditional additive SS, the proposed CASS and CAISS maintain the simplicity of the decoder. Our analysis shows that, by efficiently incorporating the side information, CASS and CAISS could significantly reduce the host effect in data hiding and improve the watermark decoding performance remarkably. To demonstrate the improved decoding performance and the robustness by employing the correlation-and-bit-aware concept, the theoretical bit-error performances of the proposed data hiding schemes in the absence and presence of additional noise are analyzed. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed data hiding schemes over traditional SS schemes.
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: A DCT based watermarking scheme is proposed which provides higher resistance to image processing attacks such as JPEG compression, noise, rotation, translation etc .
Abstract: 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.
TL;DR: The experimental results for StirMark attacks on some benchmark images support the expectation that the primary feature set can resist all the predefined attacks and its extension can enhance the robustness against undefined attacks.
Abstract: A novel feature region selection method for robust digital image watermarking is proposed in this paper. This method aims to select a nonoverlapping feature region set, which has the greatest robustness against various attacks and can preserve image quality as much as possible after watermarked. It first performs a simulated attacking procedure using some predefined attacks to evaluate the robustness of every candidate feature region. According to the evaluation results, it then adopts a track-with-pruning procedure to search a minimal primary feature set which can resist the most predefined attacks. In order to enhance its resistance to undefined attacks under the constraint of preserving image quality, the primary feature set is then extended by adding into some auxiliary feature regions. This work is formulated as a multidimensional knapsack problem and solved by a genetic algorithm based approach. The experimental results for StirMark attacks on some benchmark images support our expectation that the primary feature set can resist all the predefined attacks and its extension can enhance the robustness against undefined attacks. Comparing with some well-known feature-based methods, the proposed method exhibits better performance in robust digital watermarking.
31 Mar 2011
TL;DR: A new method for non-blind image watermarking that is robust against affine transformation and ordinary image manipulation is presented and higher performance of the proposed method in comparison with the DWT-SVD method is shown.
Abstract: In this paper, a new method for non-blind image watermarking that is robust against affine transformation and ordinary image manipulation is presented. The suggested method presents a watermarking scheme based on redundant discrete wavelet transform and Singular Value Decomposition. After applying RDWT to both cover and watermark images, we apply SVD to the LL subbands of them. We then modify singular values of the cover image using singular values of the visual watermark. The advantage of the proposed technique is its robustness against most common attacks. Analysis and experimental results show higher performance of the proposed method in comparison with the DWT-SVD method.
TL;DR: This paper proposes an intelligent watermarking by invoking particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique in wavelet domain to overcome the revealed insecurity issue, furthermore resolve the conflict between imperceptibility and robustness of watermarked.
Abstract: Meerwald, Koidl, and Uhl (2009) pointed out that the method proposed in Lin et al. (2008) exists potential insecurity. This paper proposes an intelligent watermarking by invoking particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique in wavelet domain to overcome the revealed insecurity issue, furthermore resolve the conflict between imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking. In the proposed method, PSO is fused with the method proposed in Lin et al. (2008) (denoted SDWCQ) to avoid potentially insecurity in Lin et al. (2008). That is, the method of using the fixed block size in one subband and the permutation is unable to disguise which coefficients make up a block. The attacker can utilize the insecure property and analyze the significant difference between bipolar watermarks in Lin et al. (2008) to detect the embedded blocks, furthermore modify the significant difference, and result in unable to extract the watermark. In this paper, coefficients are randomly selected from different subbands to make up a block to promote the disguise. Performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm obviously outperforms SDWCQ which does not use PSO.
TL;DR: In this article, an effective pseudonoise (PN) sequence and the corresponding decoding function for time-spread echo-based audio watermarking were proposed, where the echo kernel resulting from the new PN sequence has frequency characteristics with smaller magnitudes in perceptually significant region.
Abstract: This paper proposes an effective pseudonoise (PN) sequence and the corresponding decoding function for time-spread echo-based audio watermarking. Different from the traditional PN sequence used in time-spread echo hiding, the proposed PN sequence has two features. Firstly, the echo kernel resulting from the new PN sequence has frequency characteristics with smaller magnitudes in perceptually significant region. This leads to higher perceptual quality. Secondly, the correlation function of the new PN sequence has three times more large peaks than that of the existing PN sequence. Based on this feature, we propose a new decoding function to improve the robustness of time-spread echo-based audio watermarking. The effectiveness of the proposed PN sequence and decoding function is illustrated by theoretical analysis, simulation examples, and listening test.
TL;DR: In this paper, a new FSM watermarking scheme is proposed by making the authorship information a non-redundant property of the FSM to overcome the vulnerability to state removal attack and minimize the design overhead.
Abstract: Finite state machines (FSMs) are the backbone of sequential circuit design. In this paper, a new FSM watermarking scheme is proposed by making the authorship information a non-redundant property of the FSM. To overcome the vulnerability to state removal attack and minimize the design overhead, the watermark bits are seamlessly interwoven into the outputs of the existing and free transitions of state transition graph (STG). Unlike other transition-based STG watermarking, pseudo input variables have been reduced and made functionally indiscernible by the notion of reserved free literal. The assignment of reserved literals is exploited to minimize the overhead of watermarking and make the watermarked FSM fallible upon removal of any pseudo input variable. A direct and convenient detection scheme is also proposed to allow the watermark on the FSM to be publicly detectable. Experimental results on the watermarked circuits from the ISCAS'89 and IWLS'93 benchmark sets show lower or acceptably low overheads with higher tamper resilience and stronger authorship proof in comparison with related watermarking schemes for sequential functions.