OR-Benchmark: An Open and Reconfigurable Digital Watermarking Benchmarking Framework

Benchmarking digital watermarking algorithms is not an easy task because different applications of digital watermarking often have very different sets of requirements and trade-offs between conflicting requirements. While there have been some general-purpose digital watermarking benchmarking systems available, they normally do not support complicated benchmarking tasks and cannot be easily reconfigured to work with different watermarking algorithms and testing conditions. In this paper, we propose OR-Benchmark, an open and highly reconfigurable general-purpose digital watermarking benchmarking framework, which has the following two key features: 1) all the interfaces are public and general enough to support all watermarking applications and benchmarking tasks we can think of; 2) end users can easily extend the functionalities and freely configure what watermarking algorithms are tested, what system components are used, how the benchmarking process runs, and what results should be produced. We implemented a prototype of this framework as a MATLAB software package and used it to benchmark a number of digital watermarking algorithms involving two types of watermarks for content authentication and self-restoration purposes. The benchmarking results demonstrated the advantages of the proposed benchmarking framework, and also gave us some useful insights about existing image authentication and self-restoration watermarking algorithms which are an important but less studied topic in digital watermarking

Securing Biometric Images using Reversible Watermarking

Biometric security is a fast growing area. Protecting biometric data is very important since it can be misused by attackers. In order to increase security of biometric data there are different methods in which watermarking is widely accepted. A more acceptable, new important development in this area is reversible watermarking in which the original image can be completely restored and the watermark can be retrieved. But reversible watermarking in biometrics is an understudied area. Reversible watermarking maintains high quality of biometric data. This paper proposes Rotational Replacement of LSB as a reversible watermarking scheme for biometric images. PSNR is the regular method used for quality measurement of biometric data. In this paper we also show that SSIM Index is a better alternate for effective quality assessment for reversible watermarked biometric data by comparing with the well known reversible watermarking scheme using Difference Expansion.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Adaptive Reversible Watermarking Based on Linear Prediction for Medical Videos

Reversible video watermarking can guarantee that the watermark logo and the original frame can be recovered from the watermarked frame without any distortion. Although reversible video watermarking has successfully been applied in multimedia, its application has not been extensively explored in medical videos. Reversible watermarking in medical videos is still a challenging problem. The existing reversible video watermarking algorithms, which are based on error prediction expansion, use motion vectors for prediction. In this study, we propose an adaptive reversible watermarking method for medical videos. We suggest using temporal correlations for improving the prediction accuracy. Hence, two temporal neighbor pixels in upcoming frames are used alongside the four spatial rhombus neighboring pixels to minimize the prediction error. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this method is applied to medical videos. The method helps to protect patients' personal and medical information by watermarking, i.e., increase the security of Health Information Systems (HIS). Experimental results demonstrate the high quality of the proposed watermarking method based on PSNR metric and a large capacity for data hiding in medical videos.Comment: Algorithms are now presented in a standard forma

Performance Comparison of Contemporary DNN Watermarking Techniques

DNNs shall be considered as the intellectual property (IP) of the model builder due to the impeding cost of designing/training a highly accurate model. Research attempts have been made to protect the authorship of the trained model and prevent IP infringement using DNN watermarking techniques. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive performance comparison of the state-of-the-art DNN watermarking methodologies according to the essential requisites for an effective watermarking technique. We identify the pros and cons of each scheme and provide insights into the underlying rationale. Empirical results corroborate that DeepSigns framework proposed in [4] has the best overall performance in terms of the evaluation metrics. Our comparison facilitates the development of pending watermarking approaches and enables the model owner to deploy the watermarking scheme that satisfying her requirements

Simulation and Real-World Evaluation of Attack Detection Schemes

A variety of anomaly detection schemes have been proposed to detect malicious attacks to Cyber-Physical Systems. Among these schemes, Dynamic Watermarking methods have been proven highly effective at detecting a wide range of attacks. Unfortunately, in contrast to other anomaly detectors, no method has been presented to design a Dynamic Watermarking detector to achieve a user-specified false alarm rate, or subsequently evaluate the capabilities of an attacker under such a selection. This paper describes methods to measure the capability of an attacker, to numerically approximate this metric, and to design a Dynamic Watermarking detector that can achieve a user-specified rate of false alarms. The performance of the Dynamic Watermarking detector is compared to three classical anomaly detectors in simulation and on a real-world platform. These experiments illustrate that the attack capability under the Dynamic Watermarking detector is comparable to those of classic anomaly detectors. Importantly, these experiments also make clear that the Dynamic Watermarking detector is consistently able to detect attacks that the other class of detectors are unable to identify

Review of Robust Video Watermarking Algorithms

There has been a remarkable increase in the data exchange over web and the widespread use of digital media. As a result, multimedia data transfers also had a boost up. The mounting interest with reference to digital watermarking throughout the last decade is certainly due to the increase in the need of copyright protection of digital content. This is also enhanced due to commercial prospective. Applications of video watermarking in copy control, broadcast monitoring, fingerprinting, video authentication, copyright protection etc is immensely rising. The main aspects of information hiding are capacity, security and robustness. Capacity deals with the amount of information that can be hidden. The skill of anyone detecting the information is security and robustness refers to the resistance to modification of the cover content before concealed information is destroyed. Video watermarking algorithms normally prefers robustness. In a robust algorithm it is not possible to eliminate the watermark without rigorous degradation of the cover content. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Video Watermarking and the features required to design a robust watermarked video for a valuable application. We review several algorithms, and introduce frequently used key techniques. The aim of this paper is to focus on the various domains of video watermarking techniques. The majority of the reviewed methods based on video watermarking emphasize on the notion of robustness of the algorithm.Comment: IEEE Publication format, ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

Sequential Detection of Deception Attacks in Networked Control Systems with Watermarking

In this paper, we investigate the role of a physical watermarking signal in quickest detection of a deception attack in a scalar linear control system where the sensor measurements can be replaced by an arbitrary stationary signal generated by an attacker. By adding a random watermarking signal to the control action, the controller designs a sequential test based on a Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) method that accumulates the log-likelihood ratio of the joint distribution of the residue and the watermarking signal (under attack) and the joint distribution of the innovations and the watermarking signal under no attack. As the average detection delay in such tests is asymptotically (as the false alarm rate goes to zero) upper bounded by a quantity inversely proportional to the Kullback-Leibler divergence(KLD) measure between the two joint distributions mentioned above, we analyze the effect of the watermarking signal variance on the above KLD. We also analyze the increase in the LQG control cost due to the watermarking signal, and show that there is a tradeoff between quick detection of attacks and the penalty in the control cost. It is shown that by considering a sequential detection test based on the joint distributions of residue/innovations and the watermarking signal, as opposed to the distributions of the residue/innovations only, we can achieve a higher KLD, thus resulting in a reduced average detection delay. Numerical results are provided to support our claims.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Multiple Watermarking Algorithm Based on Spread Transform Dither Modulation

Multiple watermarking technique, embedding several watermarks in one carrier, has enabled many interesting applications. In this study, a novel multiple watermarking algorithm is proposed based on the spirit of spread transform dither modulation (STDM). It can embed multiple watermarks into the same region and the same transform domain of one image; meanwhile, the embedded watermarks can be extracted independently and blindly in the detector without any interference. Furthermore, to improve the fidelity of the watermarked image, the properties of the dither modulation quantizer and the proposed multiple watermarks embedding strategy are investigated, and two practical optimization methods are proposed. Finally, to enhance the application flexibility, an extension of the proposed algorithm is proposed which can sequentially embeds different watermarks into one image during each stage of its circulation. Compared with the pioneering multiple watermarking algorithms, the proposed one owns more flexibility in practical application and is more robust against distortion due to basic operations such as random noise, JPEG compression and volumetric scaling

A new Watermarking Technique for Secure Database

Digital multimedia watermarking technology was suggested in the last decade to embed copyright information in digital objects such images, audio and video. However, the increasing use of relational database systems in many real-life applications created an ever increasing need for watermarking database systems. As a result, watermarking relational database systems is now merging as a research area that deals with the legal issue of copyright protection of database systems. Approach: In this study, we proposed an efficient database watermarking algorithm based on inserting binary image watermarks in non-numeric mutli-word attributes of selected database tuples. Results: The algorithm is robust as it resists attempts to remove or degrade the embedded watermark and it is blind as it does not require the original database in order to extract the embedded watermark. Conclusion: Experimental results demonstrated blindness and the robustness of the algorithm against common database attacks.Comment: Databas

The Effective Key Length of Watermarking Schemes

Whereas the embedding distortion, the payload and the robustness of digital watermarking schemes are well understood, the notion of security is still not completely well defined. The approach proposed in the last five years is too theoretical and solely considers the embedding process, which is half of the watermarking scheme. This paper proposes a new measurement of watermarking security, called the effective key length, which captures the difficulty for the adversary to get access to the watermarking channel. This new methodology is applied to additive spread spectrum schemes where theoretical and practical computations of the effective key length are proposed. It shows that these schemes are not secure as soon as the adversary gets observations in the Known Message Attack context