AN INVESTIGATION OF DIFFERENT VIDEO WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES

Watermarking is an advanced technology that identifies to solve the problem of illegal manipulation and distribution of digital data. It is the art of hiding the copyright information into host such that the embedded data is imperceptible. The covers in the forms of digital multimedia object, namely image, audio and video. The extensive literature collected related to the performance improvement of video watermarking techniques is critically reviewed and presented in this paper. Also, comprehensive review of the literature on the evolution of various video watermarking techniques to achieve robustness and to maintain the quality of watermarked video sequences

On the data hiding theory and multimedia content security applications

This dissertation is a comprehensive study of digital steganography for multimedia content protection. With the increasing development of Internet technology, protection and enforcement of multimedia property rights has become a great concern to multimedia authors and distributors. Watermarking technologies provide a possible solution for this problem. The dissertation first briefly introduces the current watermarking schemes, including their applications in video,, image and audio. Most available embedding schemes are based on direct Spread Sequence (SS) modulation. A small value pseudo random signature sequence is embedded into the host signal and the information is extracted via correlation. The correlation detection problem is discussed at the beginning. It is concluded that the correlator is not optimum in oblivious detection. The Maximum Likelihood detector is derived and some feasible suboptimal detectors are also analyzed. Through the calculation of extraction Bit Error Rate (BER), it is revealed that the SS scheme is not very efficient due to its poor host noise suppression. The watermark domain selection problem is addressed subsequently. Some implications on hiding capacity and reliability are also studied. The last topic in SS modulation scheme is the sequence selection. The relationship between sequence bandwidth and synchronization requirement is detailed in the work. It is demonstrated that the white sequence commonly used in watermarking may not really boost watermark security. To address the host noise suppression problem, the hidden communication is modeled as a general hypothesis testing problem and a set partitioning scheme is proposed. Simulation studies and mathematical analysis confirm that it outperforms the SS schemes in host noise suppression. The proposed scheme demonstrates improvement over the existing embedding schemes. Data hiding in audio signals are explored next. The audio data hiding is believed a more challenging task due to the human sensitivity to audio artifacts and advanced feature of current compression techniques. The human psychoacoustic model and human music understanding are also covered in the work. Then as a typical audio perceptual compression scheme, the popular MP3 compression is visited in some length. Several schemes, amplitude modulation, phase modulation and noise substitution are presented together with some experimental results. As a case study, a music bitstream encryption scheme is proposed. In all these applications, human psychoacoustic model plays a very important role. A more advanced audio analysis model is introduced to reveal implications on music understanding. In the last part, conclusions and future research are presented

A NOVEL JOINT PERCEPTUAL ENCRYPTION AND WATERMARKING SCHEME (JPEW) WITHIN JPEG FRAMEWORK

Due to the rapid growth in internet and multimedia technologies, many new commercial applications like video on demand (VOD), pay-per-view and real-time multimedia broadcast etc, have emerged. To ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the multimedia content, the content is usually watermarked and then encrypted or vice versa. If the multimedia content needs to be watermarked and encrypted at the same time, the watermarking function needs to be performed first followed by encryption function. Hence, if the watermark needs to be extracted then the multimedia data needs to be decrypted first followed by extraction of the watermark. This results in large computational overhead. The solution provided in the literature for this problem is by using what is called partial encryption, in which media data are partitioned into two parts - one to be watermarked and the other is encrypted. In addition, some multimedia applications i.e. video on demand (VOD), Pay-TV, pay-per-view etc, allow multimedia content preview which involves „perceptual‟ encryption wherein all or some selected part of the content is, perceptually speaking, distorted with an encryption key. Up till now no joint perceptual encryption and watermarking scheme has been proposed in the literature. In this thesis, a novel Joint Perceptual Encryption and Watermarking (JPEW) scheme is proposed that is integrated within JPEG standard. The design of JPEW involves the design and development of both perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes that are integrated in JPEG and feasible within the „partial‟ encryption framework. The perceptual encryption scheme exploits the energy distribution of AC components and DC components bitplanes of continuous-tone images and is carried out by selectively encrypting these AC coefficients and DC components bitplanes. The encryption itself is based on a chaos-based permutation reported in an earlier work. Similarly, in contrast to the traditional watermarking schemes, the proposed watermarking scheme makes use of DC component of the image and it is carried out by selectively substituting certain bitplanes of DC components with watermark bits. vi ii Apart from the aforesaid JPEW, additional perceptual encryption scheme, integrated in JPEG, has also been proposed. The scheme is outside of joint framework and implements perceptual encryption on region of interest (ROI) by scrambling the DCT blocks of the chosen ROI. The performances of both, perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes are evaluated and compared with Quantization Index modulation (QIM) based watermarking scheme and reversible Histogram Spreading (RHS) based perceptual encryption scheme. The results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is imperceptible and robust, and suitable for authentication. Similarly, the proposed perceptual encryption scheme outperforms the RHS based scheme in terms of number of operations required to achieve a given level of perceptual encryption and provides control over the amount of perceptual encryption. The overall security of the JPEW has also been evaluated. Additionally, the performance of proposed separate perceptual encryption scheme has been thoroughly evaluated in terms of security and compression efficiency. The scheme is found to be simpler in implementation, have insignificant effect on compression ratios and provide more options for the selection of control factor

A robust video watermarking using simulated block based spatial domain technique

A digital watermark embeds an imperceptible signal into data such as audio, video and images, for different purposes including authentication and tamper detection. Tamper detection techniques for video watermarking play a major role of forensic evidence in court. The existing techniques for concealing information in the multimedia host are mostly based on spatial domain rather than frequency domain. The spatial domain techniques are not as robust as frequency domain techniques. In order to improve the robustness of spatial domain, a watermark can be embedded several times repeatedly. In order for spatial domain techniques to be more efficient, more payload is needed to embed additional information. The additional information would include the redundant watermarks to ensure the achievable robustness and more metadata of pixels to ensure achievable efficiency to detect more attacks. All these required additional information will degrade the imperceptibility. This research focuses on video watermarking, particularly with respect to Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) form of video file format. The block-wise method is used to determine which block exactly altered. A high imperceptible and efficient tamper detection watermarking technique is proposed which embeds in first and second Least Significant Bits (LSB). The proposed technique divides the video stream to 2*2 nonoverlapping simulated blocks. Nine common attacks to video have been applied to the proposed technique. An imperceptible and efficient tamper detection technique with a novel method of video segmentation to comprise more pixels watermarked is proposed. Experimental results show the technique is able to detect the attacks with the average of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) as 47.87dB. The results illustrate the proposed technique improves imperceptibility and efficiency of tamper detection

A NOVEL JOINT PERCEPTUAL ENCRYPTION AND WATERMARKING SCHEME (JPEW) WITHIN JPEG FRAMEWORK

Due to the rapid growth in internet and multimedia technologies, many new commercial applications like video on demand (VOD), pay-per-view and real-time multimedia broadcast etc, have emerged. To ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the multimedia content, the content is usually watermarked and then encrypted or vice versa. If the multimedia content needs to be watermarked and encrypted at the same time, the watermarking function needs to be performed first followed by encryption function. Hence, if the watermark needs to be extracted then the multimedia data needs to be decrypted first followed by extraction of the watermark. This results in large computational overhead. The solution provided in the literature for this problem is by using what is called partial encryption, in which media data are partitioned into two parts - one to be watermarked and the other is encrypted. In addition, some multimedia applications i.e. video on demand (VOD), Pay-TV, pay-per-view etc, allow multimedia content preview which involves „perceptual‟ encryption wherein all or some selected part of the content is, perceptually speaking, distorted with an encryption key. Up till now no joint perceptual encryption and watermarking scheme has been proposed in the literature. In this thesis, a novel Joint Perceptual Encryption and Watermarking (JPEW) scheme is proposed that is integrated within JPEG standard. The design of JPEW involves the design and development of both perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes that are integrated in JPEG and feasible within the „partial‟ encryption framework. The perceptual encryption scheme exploits the energy distribution of AC components and DC components bitplanes of continuous-tone images and is carried out by selectively encrypting these AC coefficients and DC components bitplanes. The encryption itself is based on a chaos-based permutation reported in an earlier work. Similarly, in contrast to the traditional watermarking schemes, the proposed watermarking scheme makes use of DC component of the image and it is carried out by selectively substituting certain bitplanes of DC components with watermark bits. vi ii Apart from the aforesaid JPEW, additional perceptual encryption scheme, integrated in JPEG, has also been proposed. The scheme is outside of joint framework and implements perceptual encryption on region of interest (ROI) by scrambling the DCT blocks of the chosen ROI. The performances of both, perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes are evaluated and compared with Quantization Index modulation (QIM) based watermarking scheme and reversible Histogram Spreading (RHS) based perceptual encryption scheme. The results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is imperceptible and robust, and suitable for authentication. Similarly, the proposed perceptual encryption scheme outperforms the RHS based scheme in terms of number of operations required to achieve a given level of perceptual encryption and provides control over the amount of perceptual encryption. The overall security of the JPEW has also been evaluated. Additionally, the performance of proposed separate perceptual encryption scheme has been thoroughly evaluated in terms of security and compression efficiency. The scheme is found to be simpler in implementation, have insignificant effect on compression ratios and provide more options for the selection of control factor

Joint Compression and Watermarking Using Variable-Rate Quantization and its Applications to JPEG

In digital watermarking, one embeds a watermark into a covertext, in such a way that the resulting watermarked signal is robust to a certain distortion caused by either standard data processing in a friendly environment or malicious attacks in an unfriendly environment. In addition to the robustness, there are two other conflicting requirements a good watermarking system should meet: one is referred as perceptual quality, that is, the distortion incurred to the original signal should be small; and the other is payload, the amount of information embedded (embedding rate) should be as high as possible. To a large extent, digital watermarking is a science and/or art aiming to design watermarking systems meeting these three conflicting requirements. As watermarked signals are highly desired to be compressed in real world applications, we have looked into the design and analysis of joint watermarking and compression (JWC) systems to achieve efficient tradeoffs among the embedding rate, compression rate, distortion and robustness. Using variable-rate scalar quantization, an optimum encoding and decoding scheme for JWC systems is designed and analyzed to maximize the robustness in the presence of additive Gaussian attacks under constraints on both compression distortion and composite rate. Simulation results show that in comparison with the previous work of designing JWC systems using fixed-rate scalar quantization, optimum JWC systems using variable-rate scalar quantization can achieve better performance in the distortion-to-noise ratio region of practical interest. Inspired by the good performance of JWC systems, we then investigate its applications in image compression. We look into the design of a joint image compression and blind watermarking system to maximize the compression rate-distortion performance while maintaining baseline JPEG decoder compatibility and satisfying the additional constraints imposed by watermarking. Two watermarking embedding schemes, odd-even watermarking (OEW) and zero-nonzero watermarking (ZNW), have been proposed for the robustness to a class of standard JPEG recompression attacks. To maximize the compression performance, two corresponding alternating algorithms have been developed to jointly optimize run-length coding, Huffman coding and quantization table selection subject to the additional constraints imposed by OEW and ZNW respectively. Both of two algorithms have been demonstrated to have better compression performance than the DQW and DEW algorithms developed in the recent literature. Compared with OEW scheme, the ZNW embedding method sacrifices some payload but earns more robustness against other types of attacks. In particular, the zero-nonzero watermarking scheme can survive a class of valumetric distortion attacks including additive noise, amplitude changes and recompression for everyday usage

Data Hiding in Digital Video

With the rapid development of digital multimedia technologies, an old method which is called steganography has been sought to be a solution for data hiding applications such as digital watermarking and covert communication. Steganography is the art of secret communication using a cover signal, e.g., video, audio, image etc., whereas the counter-technique, detecting the existence of such as a channel through a statistically trained classifier, is called steganalysis. The state-of-the art data hiding algorithms utilize features; such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients, pixel values, motion vectors etc., of the cover signal to convey the message to the receiver side. The goal of embedding algorithm is to maximize the number of bits sent to the decoder side (embedding capacity) with maximum robustness against attacks while keeping the perceptual and statistical distortions (security) low. Data Hiding schemes are characterized by these three conflicting requirements: security against steganalysis, robustness against channel associated and/or intentional distortions, and the capacity in terms of the embedded payload. Depending upon the application it is the designer\u27s task to find an optimum solution amongst them. The goal of this thesis is to develop a novel data hiding scheme to establish a covert channel satisfying statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate capacity and robustness to combat steganalysis based detection. The idea behind the proposed method is the alteration of Video Object (VO) trajectory coordinates to convey the message to the receiver side by perturbing the centroid coordinates of the VO. Firstly, the VO is selected by the user and tracked through the frames by using a simple region based search strategy and morphological operations. After the trajectory coordinates are obtained, the perturbation of the coordinates implemented through the usage of a non-linear embedding function, such as a polar quantizer where both the magnitude and phase of the motion is used. However, the perturbations made to the motion magnitude and phase were kept small to preserve the semantic meaning of the object motion trajectory. The proposed method is well suited to the video sequences in which VOs have smooth motion trajectories. Examples of these types could be found in sports videos in which the ball is the focus of attention and exhibits various motion types, e.g., rolling on the ground, flying in the air, being possessed by a player, etc. Different sports video sequences have been tested by using the proposed method. Through the experimental results, it is shown that the proposed method achieved the goal of both statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate embedding capacity under AWGN channel with varying noise variances. This achievement is important as the first step for both active and passive steganalysis is the detection of the existence of covert channel. This work has multiple contributions in the field of data hiding. Firstly, it is the first example of a data hiding method in which the trajectory of a VO is used. Secondly, this work has contributed towards improving steganographic security by providing new features: the coordinate location and semantic meaning of the object

Schémas de tatouage d'images, schémas de tatouage conjoint à la compression, et schémas de dissimulation de données

In this manuscript we address data-hiding in images and videos. Specifically we address robust watermarking for images, robust watermarking jointly with compression, and finally non robust data-hiding.The first part of the manuscript deals with high-rate robust watermarking. After having briefly recalled the concept of informed watermarking, we study the two major watermarking families : trellis-based watermarking and quantized-based watermarking. We propose, firstly to reduce the computational complexity of the trellis-based watermarking, with a rotation based embedding, and secondly to introduce a trellis-based quantization in a watermarking system based on quantization.The second part of the manuscript addresses the problem of watermarking jointly with a JPEG2000 compression step or an H.264 compression step. The quantization step and the watermarking step are achieved simultaneously, so that these two steps do not fight against each other. Watermarking in JPEG2000 is achieved by using the trellis quantization from the part 2 of the standard. Watermarking in H.264 is performed on the fly, after the quantization stage, choosing the best prediction through the process of rate-distortion optimization. We also propose to integrate a Tardos code to build an application for traitors tracing.The last part of the manuscript describes the different mechanisms of color hiding in a grayscale image. We propose two approaches based on hiding a color palette in its index image. The first approach relies on the optimization of an energetic function to get a decomposition of the color image allowing an easy embedding. The second approach consists in quickly obtaining a color palette of larger size and then in embedding it in a reversible way.Dans ce manuscrit nous abordons l’insertion de données dans les images et les vidéos. Plus particulièrement nous traitons du tatouage robuste dans les images, du tatouage robuste conjointement à la compression et enfin de l’insertion de données (non robuste).La première partie du manuscrit traite du tatouage robuste à haute capacité. Après avoir brièvement rappelé le concept de tatouage informé, nous étudions les deux principales familles de tatouage : le tatouage basé treillis et le tatouage basé quantification. Nous proposons d’une part de réduire la complexité calculatoire du tatouage basé treillis par une approche d’insertion par rotation, ainsi que d’autre part d’introduire une approche par quantification basée treillis au seind’un système de tatouage basé quantification.La deuxième partie du manuscrit aborde la problématique de tatouage conjointement à la phase de compression par JPEG2000 ou par H.264. L’idée consiste à faire en même temps l’étape de quantification et l’étape de tatouage, de sorte que ces deux étapes ne « luttent pas » l’une contre l’autre. Le tatouage au sein de JPEG2000 est effectué en détournant l’utilisation de la quantification basée treillis de la partie 2 du standard. Le tatouage au sein de H.264 est effectué à la volée, après la phase de quantification, en choisissant la meilleure prédiction via le processus d’optimisation débit-distorsion. Nous proposons également d’intégrer un code de Tardos pour construire une application de traçage de traîtres.La dernière partie du manuscrit décrit les différents mécanismes de dissimulation d’une information couleur au sein d’une image en niveaux de gris. Nous proposons deux approches reposant sur la dissimulation d’une palette couleur dans son image d’index. La première approche consiste à modéliser le problème puis à l’optimiser afin d’avoir une bonne décomposition de l’image couleur ainsi qu’une insertion aisée. La seconde approche consiste à obtenir, de manière rapide et sûre, une palette de plus grande dimension puis à l’insérer de manière réversible

Multimedia Protection using Content and Embedded Fingerprints

Improved digital connectivity has made the Internet an important medium for multimedia distribution and consumption in recent years. At the same time, this increased proliferation of multimedia has raised significant challenges in secure multimedia distribution and intellectual property protection. This dissertation examines two complementary aspects of the multimedia protection problem that utilize content fingerprints and embedded collusion-resistant fingerprints. The first aspect considered is the automated identification of multimedia using content fingerprints, which is emerging as an important tool for detecting copyright violations on user generated content websites. A content fingerprint is a compact identifier that captures robust and distinctive properties of multimedia content, which can be used for uniquely identifying the multimedia object. In this dissertation, we describe a modular framework for theoretical modeling and analysis of content fingerprinting techniques. Based on this framework, we analyze the impact of distortions in the features on the corresponding fingerprints and also consider the problem of designing a suitable quantizer for encoding the features in order to improve the identification accuracy. The interaction between the fingerprint designer and a malicious adversary seeking to evade detection is studied under a game-theoretic framework and optimal strategies for both parties are derived. We then focus on analyzing and understanding the matching process at the fingerprint level. Models for fingerprints with different types of correlations are developed and the identification accuracy under each model is examined. Through this analysis we obtain useful guidelines for designing practical systems and also uncover connections to other areas of research. A complementary problem considered in this dissertation concerns tracing the users responsible for unauthorized redistribution of multimedia. Collusion-resistant fingerprints, which are signals that uniquely identify the recipient, are proactively embedded in the multimedia before redistribution and can be used for identifying the malicious users. We study the problem of designing collusion resistant fingerprints for embedding in compressed multimedia. Our study indicates that directly adapting traditional fingerprinting techniques to this new setting of compressed multimedia results in low collusion resistance. To withstand attacks, we propose an anti-collusion dithering technique for embedding fingerprints that significantly improves the collusion resistance compared to traditional fingerprints