A Study on Invisible Digital Image and Video Watermarking Techniques

Digital watermarking was introduced as a result of rapid advancement of networked multimedia systems. It had been developed to enforce copyright technologies for cover of copyright possession. This technology is first used for still images however recently they need been developed for different multimedia objects like audio, video etc. Watermarking, that belong to the information hiding field, has seen plenty of research interest. There's a lot of work begin conducted in numerous branches in this field. The image watermarking techniques might divide on the idea of domain like spatial domain or transform domain or on the basis of wavelets. The copyright protection, capacity, security, strength etc are a number of the necessary factors that are taken in account whereas the watermarking system is intended. This paper aims to produce a detailed survey of all watermarking techniques specially focuses on image watermarking types and its applications in today’s world

Robust watermarking for magnetic resonance images with automatic region of interest detection

Medical image watermarking requires special considerations compared to ordinary watermarking methods. The first issue is the detection of an important area of the image called the Region of Interest (ROI) prior to starting the watermarking process. Most existing ROI detection procedures use manual-based methods, while in automated methods the robustness against intentional or unintentional attacks has not been considered extensively. The second issue is the robustness of the embedded watermark against different attacks. A common drawback of existing watermarking methods is their weakness against salt and pepper noise. The research carried out in this thesis addresses these issues of having automatic ROI detection for magnetic resonance images that are robust against attacks particularly the salt and pepper noise and designing a new watermarking method that can withstand high density salt and pepper noise. In the ROI detection part, combinations of several algorithms such as morphological reconstruction, adaptive thresholding and labelling are utilized. The noise-filtering algorithm and window size correction block are then introduced for further enhancement. The performance of the proposed ROI detection is evaluated by computing the Comparative Accuracy (CA). In the watermarking part, a combination of spatial method, channel coding and noise filtering schemes are used to increase the robustness against salt and pepper noise. The quality of watermarked image is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and the accuracy of the extracted watermark is assessed in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER). Based on experiments, the CA under eight different attacks (speckle noise, average filter, median filter, Wiener filter, Gaussian filter, sharpening filter, motion, and salt and pepper noise) is between 97.8% and 100%. The CA under different densities of salt and pepper noise (10%-90%) is in the range of 75.13% to 98.99%. In the watermarking part, the performance of the proposed method under different densities of salt and pepper noise measured by total PSNR, ROI PSNR, total SSIM and ROI SSIM has improved in the ranges of 3.48-23.03 (dB), 3.5-23.05 (dB), 0-0.4620 and 0-0.5335 to 21.75-42.08 (dB), 20.55-40.83 (dB), 0.5775-0.8874 and 0.4104-0.9742 respectively. In addition, the BER is reduced to the range of 0.02% to 41.7%. To conclude, the proposed method has managed to significantly improve the performance of existing medical image watermarking methods

Visual Privacy Protection Methods: A Survey

Recent advances in computer vision technologies have made possible the development of intelligent monitoring systems for video surveillance and ambient-assisted living. By using this technology, these systems are able to automatically interpret visual data from the environment and perform tasks that would have been unthinkable years ago. These achievements represent a radical improvement but they also suppose a new threat to individual’s privacy. The new capabilities of such systems give them the ability to collect and index a huge amount of private information about each individual. Next-generation systems have to solve this issue in order to obtain the users’ acceptance. Therefore, there is a need for mechanisms or tools to protect and preserve people’s privacy. This paper seeks to clarify how privacy can be protected in imagery data, so as a main contribution a comprehensive classification of the protection methods for visual privacy as well as an up-to-date review of them are provided. A survey of the existing privacy-aware intelligent monitoring systems and a valuable discussion of important aspects of visual privacy are also provided.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project “Sistema de visión para la monitorización de la actividad de la vida diaria en el hogar” (TIN2010-20510-C04-02) and by the European Commission under project “caring4U - A study on people activity in private spaces: towards a multisensor network that meets privacy requirements” (PIEF-GA-2010-274649). José Ramón Padilla López and Alexandros Andre Chaaraoui acknowledge financial support by the Conselleria d'Educació, Formació i Ocupació of the Generalitat Valenciana (fellowship ACIF/2012/064 and ACIF/2011/160 respectively)

Significant medical image compression techniques: a review

Telemedicine applications allow the patient and doctor to communicate with each other through network services. Several medical image compression techniques have been suggested by researchers in the past years. This review paper offers a comparison of the algorithms and the performance by analysing three factors that influence the choice of compression algorithm, which are image quality, compression ratio, and compression speed. The results of previous research have shown that there is a need for effective algorithms for medical imaging without data loss, which is why the lossless compression process is used to compress medical records. Lossless compression, however, has minimal compression ratio efficiency. The way to get the optimum compression ratio is by segmentation of the image into region of interest (ROI) and non-ROI zones, where the power and time needed can be minimised due to the smaller scale. Recently, several researchers have been attempting to create hybrid compression algorithms by integrating different compression techniques to increase the efficiency of compression algorithms

Design of a secure architecture for the exchange of biomedical information in m-Health scenarios

El paradigma de m-Salud (salud móvil) aboga por la integración masiva de las más avanzadas tecnologías de comunicación, red móvil y sensores en aplicaciones y sistemas de salud, para fomentar el despliegue de un nuevo modelo de atención clínica centrada en el usuario/paciente. Este modelo tiene por objetivos el empoderamiento de los usuarios en la gestión de su propia salud (p.ej. aumentando sus conocimientos, promocionando estilos de vida saludable y previniendo enfermedades), la prestación de una mejor tele-asistencia sanitaria en el hogar para ancianos y pacientes crónicos y una notable disminución del gasto de los Sistemas de Salud gracias a la reducción del número y la duración de las hospitalizaciones. No obstante, estas ventajas, atribuidas a las aplicaciones de m-Salud, suelen venir acompañadas del requisito de un alto grado de disponibilidad de la información biomédica de sus usuarios para garantizar una alta calidad de servicio, p.ej. fusionar varias señales de un usuario para obtener un diagnóstico más preciso. La consecuencia negativa de cumplir esta demanda es el aumento directo de las superficies potencialmente vulnerables a ataques, lo que sitúa a la seguridad (y a la privacidad) del modelo de m-Salud como factor crítico para su éxito. Como requisito no funcional de las aplicaciones de m-Salud, la seguridad ha recibido menos atención que otros requisitos técnicos que eran más urgentes en etapas de desarrollo previas, tales como la robustez, la eficiencia, la interoperabilidad o la usabilidad. Otro factor importante que ha contribuido a retrasar la implementación de políticas de seguridad sólidas es que garantizar un determinado nivel de seguridad implica unos costes que pueden ser muy relevantes en varias dimensiones, en especial en la económica (p.ej. sobrecostes por la inclusión de hardware extra para la autenticación de usuarios), en el rendimiento (p.ej. reducción de la eficiencia y de la interoperabilidad debido a la integración de elementos de seguridad) y en la usabilidad (p.ej. configuración más complicada de dispositivos y aplicaciones de salud debido a las nuevas opciones de seguridad). Por tanto, las soluciones de seguridad que persigan satisfacer a todos los actores del contexto de m-Salud (usuarios, pacientes, personal médico, personal técnico, legisladores, fabricantes de dispositivos y equipos, etc.) deben ser robustas y al mismo tiempo minimizar sus costes asociados. Esta Tesis detalla una propuesta de seguridad, compuesta por cuatro grandes bloques interconectados, para dotar de seguridad a las arquitecturas de m-Salud con unos costes reducidos. El primer bloque define un esquema global que proporciona unos niveles de seguridad e interoperabilidad acordes con las características de las distintas aplicaciones de m-Salud. Este esquema está compuesto por tres capas diferenciadas, diseñadas a la medidas de los dominios de m-Salud y de sus restricciones, incluyendo medidas de seguridad adecuadas para la defensa contra las amenazas asociadas a sus aplicaciones de m-Salud. El segundo bloque establece la extensión de seguridad de aquellos protocolos estándar que permiten la adquisición, el intercambio y/o la administración de información biomédica -- por tanto, usados por muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud -- pero no reúnen los niveles de seguridad detallados en el esquema previo. Estas extensiones se concretan para los estándares biomédicos ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD y SCP-ECG. El tercer bloque propone nuevas formas de fortalecer la seguridad de los tests biomédicos, que constituyen el elemento esencial de muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud de carácter clínico, mediante codificaciones novedosas. Finalmente el cuarto bloque, que se sitúa en paralelo a los anteriores, selecciona herramientas genéricas de seguridad (elementos de autenticación y criptográficos) cuya integración en los otros bloques resulta idónea, y desarrolla nuevas herramientas de seguridad, basadas en señal -- embedding y keytagging --, para reforzar la protección de los test biomédicos.The paradigm of m-Health (mobile health) advocates for the massive integration of advanced mobile communications, network and sensor technologies in healthcare applications and systems to foster the deployment of a new, user/patient-centered healthcare model enabling the empowerment of users in the management of their health (e.g. by increasing their health literacy, promoting healthy lifestyles and the prevention of diseases), a better home-based healthcare delivery for elderly and chronic patients and important savings for healthcare systems due to the reduction of hospitalizations in number and duration. It is a fact that many m-Health applications demand high availability of biomedical information from their users (for further accurate analysis, e.g. by fusion of various signals) to guarantee high quality of service, which on the other hand entails increasing the potential surfaces for attacks. Therefore, it is not surprising that security (and privacy) is commonly included among the most important barriers for the success of m-Health. As a non-functional requirement for m-Health applications, security has received less attention than other technical issues that were more pressing at earlier development stages, such as reliability, eficiency, interoperability or usability. Another fact that has contributed to delaying the enforcement of robust security policies is that guaranteeing a certain security level implies costs that can be very relevant and that span along diferent dimensions. These include budgeting (e.g. the demand of extra hardware for user authentication), performance (e.g. lower eficiency and interoperability due to the addition of security elements) and usability (e.g. cumbersome configuration of devices and applications due to security options). Therefore, security solutions that aim to satisfy all the stakeholders in the m-Health context (users/patients, medical staff, technical staff, systems and devices manufacturers, regulators, etc.) shall be robust and, at the same time, minimize their associated costs. This Thesis details a proposal, composed of four interrelated blocks, to integrate appropriate levels of security in m-Health architectures in a cost-efcient manner. The first block designes a global scheme that provides different security and interoperability levels accordingto how critical are the m-Health applications to be implemented. This consists ofthree layers tailored to the m-Health domains and their constraints, whose security countermeasures defend against the threats of their associated m-Health applications. Next, the second block addresses the security extension of those standard protocols that enable the acquisition, exchange and/or management of biomedical information | thus, used by many m-Health applications | but do not meet the security levels described in the former scheme. These extensions are materialized for the biomedical standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG. Then, the third block proposes new ways of enhancing the security of biomedical standards, which are the centerpiece of many clinical m-Health applications, by means of novel codings. Finally the fourth block, with is parallel to the others, selects generic security methods (for user authentication and cryptographic protection) whose integration in the other blocks results optimal, and also develops novel signal-based methods (embedding and keytagging) for strengthening the security of biomedical tests. The layer-based extensions of the standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG can be considered as robust, cost-eficient and respectful with their original features and contents. The former adds no attributes to its data information model, four new frames to the service model |and extends four with new sub-frames|, and only one new sub-state to the communication model. Furthermore, a lightweight architecture consisting of a personal health device mounting a 9 MHz processor and an aggregator mounting a 1 GHz processor is enough to transmit a 3-lead electrocardiogram in real-time implementing the top security layer. The extra requirements associated to this extension are an initial configuration of the health device and the aggregator, tokens for identification/authentication of users if these devices are to be shared and the implementation of certain IHE profiles in the aggregator to enable the integration of measurements in healthcare systems. As regards to the extension of SCP-ECG, it only adds a new section with selected security elements and syntax in order to protect the rest of file contents and provide proper role-based access control. The overhead introduced in the protected SCP-ECG is typically 2{13 % of the regular file size, and the extra delays to protect a newly generated SCP-ECG file and to access it for interpretation are respectively a 2{10 % and a 5 % of the regular delays. As regards to the signal-based security techniques developed, the embedding method is the basis for the proposal of a generic coding for tests composed of biomedical signals, periodic measurements and contextual information. This has been adjusted and evaluated with electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram-based tests, proving the objective clinical quality of the coded tests, the capacity of the coding-access system to operate in real-time (overall delays of 2 s for electrocardiograms and 3.3 s for electroencephalograms) and its high usability. Despite of the embedding of security and metadata to enable m-Health services, the compression ratios obtained by this coding range from ' 3 in real-time transmission to ' 5 in offline operation. Complementarily, keytagging permits associating information to images (and other signals) by means of keys in a secure and non-distorting fashion, which has been availed to implement security measures such as image authentication, integrity control and location of tampered areas, private captioning with role-based access control, traceability and copyright protection. The tests conducted indicate a remarkable robustness-capacity tradeoff that permits implementing all this measures simultaneously, and the compatibility of keytagging with JPEG2000 compression, maintaining this tradeoff while setting the overall keytagging delay in only ' 120 ms for any image size | evidencing the scalability of this technique. As a general conclusion, it has been demonstrated and illustrated with examples that there are various, complementary and structured manners to contribute in the implementation of suitable security levels for m-Health architectures with a moderate cost in budget, performance, interoperability and usability. The m-Health landscape is evolving permanently along all their dimensions, and this Thesis aims to do so with its security. Furthermore, the lessons learned herein may offer further guidance for the elaboration of more comprehensive and updated security schemes, for the extension of other biomedical standards featuring low emphasis on security or privacy, and for the improvement of the state of the art regarding signal-based protection methods and applications

Medical image : ROI and RONI definition using fuzzy logic

This thesis discusses on the edge detection in fuzzy logic before medical image watermarking. Normally most of the researcher defined the ROT and RON! in the medical image manually. This research will be proposed that the ROl and ROM in the medical image can be defined automatically by using fuzzy logic. There are rules of inference in the FIS which will affect the relationship between the different variables of a fuzzy system input variable and fuzzy output. The images will be used to process are ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography etc. Firstly, the area of interest (ROl) of the particular ultrasound image will be determined using fuzzy logic. 2x2 pixel window is used to determine whether the pixel is black, white or an edge. Then, we definitely know that which is the ROl and ROM in the ultrasound image by determining the edge using FIS. Thus, this will help doctor on determining the ROT which could be faster than doctor determined it one by one. Computational system should implement widely due to the increasing of medical image. After that, it will proceed with embed the watermark on the ROM by using least significant bit (LSB) technique or other techniques so that it can help in preserve imperceptibility of the watermarked image

Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Triple scheme based on image steganography to improve imperceptibility and security

A foremost priority in the information technology and communication era is achieving an effective and secure steganography scheme when considering information hiding. Commonly, the digital images are used as the cover for the steganography owing to their redundancy in the representation, making them hidden to the intruders. Nevertheless, any steganography system launched over the internet can be attacked upon recognizing the stego cover. Presently, the design and development of an effective image steganography system are facing several challenging issues including the low capacity, poor security, and imperceptibility. Towards overcoming the aforementioned issues, a new decomposition scheme was proposed for image steganography with a new approach known as a Triple Number Approach (TNA). In this study, three main stages were used to achieve objectives and overcome the issues of image steganography, beginning with image and text preparation, followed by embedding and culminating in extraction. Finally, the evaluation stage employed several evaluations in order to benchmark the results. Different contributions were presented with this study. The first contribution was a Triple Text Coding Method (TTCM), which was related to the preparation of secret messages prior to the embedding process. The second contribution was a Triple Embedding Method (TEM), which was related to the embedding process. The third contribution was related to security criteria which were based on a new partitioning of an image known as the Image Partitioning Method (IPM). The IPM proposed a random pixel selection, based on image partitioning into three phases with three iterations of the Hénon Map function. An enhanced Huffman coding algorithm was utilized to compress the secret message before TTCM process. A standard dataset from the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) containing color and grayscale images with 512 x 512 pixels were utilised in this study. Different parameters were used to test the performance of the proposed scheme based on security and imperceptibility (image quality). In image quality, four important measurements that were used are Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Histogram analysis. Whereas, two security measurements that were used are Human Visual System (HVS) and Chi-square (X2) attacks. In terms of PSNR and SSIM, the Lena grayscale image obtained results were 78.09 and 1 dB, respectively. Meanwhile, the HVS and X2 attacks obtained high results when compared to the existing scheme in the literature. Based on the findings, the proposed scheme give evidence to increase capacity, imperceptibility, and security to overcome existing issues