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

Perceptual Copyright Protection Using Multiresolution Wavelet-Based Watermarking And Fuzzy Logic

In this paper, an efficiently DWT-based watermarking technique is proposed to embed signatures in images to attest the owner identification and discourage the unauthorized copying. This paper deals with a fuzzy inference filter to choose the larger entropy of coefficients to embed watermarks. Unlike most previous watermarking frameworks which embedded watermarks in the larger coefficients of inner coarser subbands, the proposed technique is based on utilizing a context model and fuzzy inference filter by embedding watermarks in the larger-entropy coefficients of coarser DWT subbands. The proposed approaches allow us to embed adaptive casting degree of watermarks for transparency and robustness to the general image-processing attacks such as smoothing, sharpening, and JPEG compression. The approach has no need the original host image to extract watermarks. Our schemes have been shown to provide very good results in both image transparency and robustness.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Fast watermarking of MPEG-1/2 streams using compressed-domain perceptual embedding and a generalized correlator detector

A novel technique is proposed for watermarking of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 compressed video streams. The proposed scheme is applied directly in the domain of MPEG-1 system streams and MPEG-2 program streams (multiplexed streams). Perceptual models are used during the embedding process in order to avoid degradation of the video quality. The watermark is detected without the use of the original video sequence. A modified correlation-based detector is introduced that applies nonlinear preprocessing before correlation. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand several common attacks. The resulting watermarking system is very fast and therefore suitable for copyright protection of compressed video

Robust Video Watermarking Based On 3D-DWT Domain.

The digital watermarks have recently been recognized as a solution for protecting the copyright of the digital multimedia

A survey of digital image watermarking techniques

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