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

Implementation of Adaptive Unsharp Masking as a pre-filtering method for watermark detection and extraction

Digital watermarking has been one of the focal points of research interests in order to provide multimedia security in the last decade. Watermark data, belonging to the user, are embedded on an original work such as text, audio, image, and video and thus, product ownership can be proved. Various robust watermarking algorithms have been developed in order to extract/detect the watermark against such attacks. Although watermarking algorithms in the transform domain differ from others by different combinations of transform techniques, it is difficult to decide on an algorithm for a specific application. Therefore, instead of developing a new watermarking algorithm with different combinations of transform techniques, we propose a novel and effective watermark extraction and detection method by pre-filtering, namely Adaptive Unsharp Masking (AUM). In spite of the fact that Unsharp Masking (UM) based pre-filtering is used for watermark extraction/detection in the literature by causing the details of the watermarked image become more manifest, effectiveness of UM may decrease in some cases of attacks. In this study, AUM has been proposed for pre-filtering as a solution to the disadvantages of UM. Experimental results show that AUM performs better up to 11\% in objective quality metrics than that of the results when pre-filtering is not used. Moreover; AUM proposed for pre-filtering in the transform domain image watermarking is as effective as that of used in image enhancement and can be applied in an algorithm-independent way for pre-filtering in transform domain image watermarking

Fast compressed domain watermarking of MPEG multiplexed streams

In this paper, a new technique for watermarking of MPEG compressed video streams is proposed. The watermarking scheme operates directly in the domain of MPEG multiplexed streams. Perceptual models are used during the embedding process in order to preserve the quality of the video. The watermark is embedded in the compressed domain and is detected without the use of the original video sequence. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand a variety of attacks. The resulting watermarking system is very fast and reliable, and is suitable for copyright protection and real-time content authentication applications

Copyright Protection of Color Imaging Using Robust-Encoded Watermarking

In this paper we present a robust-encoded watermarking method applied to color images for copyright protection, which presents robustness against several geometric and signal processing distortions. Trade-off between payload, robustness and imperceptibility is a very important aspect which has to be considered when a watermark algorithm is designed. In our proposed scheme, previously to be embedded into the image, the watermark signal is encoded using a convolutional encoder, which can perform forward error correction achieving better robustness performance. Then, the embedding process is carried out through the discrete cosine transform domain (DCT) of an image using the image normalization technique to accomplish robustness against geometric and signal processing distortions. The embedded watermark coded bits are extracted and decoded using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to determine the presence or absence of the watermark into the image we compute the bit error rate (BER) between the recovered and the original watermark data sequence. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the well-known indices: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The color difference between the watermarked and original images is obtained by using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides good performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison among the proposed and previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided