A Comprehensive Review on Digital Image Watermarking

The advent of the Internet led to the easy availability of digital data like images, audio, and video. Easy access to multimedia gives rise to the issues such as content authentication, security, copyright protection, and ownership identification. Here, we discuss the concept of digital image watermarking with a focus on the technique used in image watermark embedding and extraction of the watermark. The detailed classification along with the basic characteristics, namely visual imperceptibility, robustness, capacity, security of digital watermarking is also presented in this work. Further, we have also discussed the recent application areas of digital watermarking such as healthcare, remote education, electronic voting systems, and the military. The robustness is evaluated by examining the effect of image processing attacks on the signed content and the watermark recoverability. The authors believe that the comprehensive survey presented in this paper will help the new researchers to gather knowledge in this domain. Further, the comparative analysis can enkindle ideas to improve upon the already mentioned techniques

Security and Watermarking of Color Images

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A buyer-seller watermarking protocol for digital secondary market

In the digital right management value chain, digital watermarking technology plays a very important role in digital product’s security, especially on its usage tracking and copyrights infringement authentication. However, watermark procedures can only effectively support copyright protection processes if they are applied as part of an appropriate watermark protocol. In this regard, a number of watermark protocols have been proposed in the literature and have been shown to facilitate the use of digital watermarking technology as copyright protection. One example of such protocols is the anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocol. Although there are a number of protocols that have been proposed in the literature and provide suitable solutions, they are mainly designed as a watermarking protocol for the first-hand market and are unsuitable for second-hand transactions. As the complexity of online transaction increases, so does the size of the digital second-hand market. In this paper, we present a new buyer-seller watermark protocol that addresses the needs of customer’s rights problem in the digital secondary market. The proposed protocol consists of five sub-protocols that cover the registration process, watermarking process for the first, second and third-hand transactions as well as the identification & arbitration processes. This paper provides analysis that compares the proposed protocols with existing state-of-the-arts and shows that it has met not only all the buyer’s and seller’s requirements in the traditional sense but also accommodates the same requirements in the secondary market

Digital Watermarking Technique For Protecting Data and Image Authentication

Due to immense growth in the online data storage, security of the important information has become a keen point of interest. Hiding of an information involves its concealment, so that an eavesdropper does not trace out the existence of that information. In the field of image processing, the data hiding techniques play a vital role for authenticating the digital data and its copyright protection. Digital watermarking is one of the efficient technique for embedding significant information over the digital signals in order to check and maintain the authenticity of it’s author and to safeguard it from being used illegally.In this paper, a creamer framework utilizing three individual watermarking systems i.e. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is proposed. This strategy abuses the upsides of the three individual frameworks and in this way gives a prevalent security arrangement when appeared differently in relation to various techniques. The examination of scale segment used as a part of the proposed procedure close by the graphical results is moreover done.           

Improvement Of Hybrid Digital Image Watermarking Schemes Based On Svd In Wavelet Transform Domain

Digital image watermarking techniques have enabled imperceptible information in images to be hidden to ensure the information can be extracted later from those images. Robustness, imperceptibility, capacity and security are the most important requirements of any watermarking scheme. Recently, hybrid Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)- based watermarking schemes in the wavelet domain have significantly gained a lot of attention. The aim of this study is to develop hybrid digital image watermarking schemes by combining the properties of SVD and the chosen wavelet transforms to achieve high robustness and imperceptibility, as well as maintaining the trade-off between robustness, imperceptibility and capacity. The security issue due to the false positive problem (FPP) that may be occurring in most of SVD-based watermarking schemes, has been covered and addressed. This study proposes five hybrid robust SVD-based image watermarking schemes in the wavelet domain. In the first scheme, a grey image watermark is embedded directly into the singular values (S) of each redundant discrete wavelet transform transform (RDWT) sub-band of the host image. The scheme is named RDWT-SVD. The second proposed scheme, namely IWT-SVD-AT, utilised the integer wavelet transform (IWT) instead of RDWT due to its properties. The watermark is scrambled using Arnold Transform (AT) before being embedded into the S of each IWT sub-band host. Despite the impressive results by the first and the second schemes, they were vulnerable to the FPP. Thus, they have failed to resolve the rightful ownership. In the third scheme, a hybrid IWT-SVD scheme is proposed with a novel Digital Signature (DS)-based authentication mechanism to solve the FPP. The scheme outperforms the previous schemes in terms of robustness, capacity, security, computation time and attains high imperceptibility. In the remaining two proposed schemes; the fourth and fifth schemes, the FPP is totally avoided using new different embedding strategies. In the fourth scheme namely IWT-SVD-MOACO, the singular vector U of the watermark is embedded into the S of IWT LL sub-band. Multi-objective ant colony optimisation (MOACO) is used to find the optimal multiple zooming/scaling factor (MZF) instead of the single scaling factor (SSF) to achieve the optimal trade-off between imperceptibility and robustness. Finally, a hybrid SVD block-based scheme namely DWT-SVD-HVS using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is developed. A binary watermark is embedded into a number of blocks which is selected based on some human visual system (HVS) criterion. The scheme shows a high imperceptibility and good robustness. Finally, all the proposed schemes are evaluated with different colour images and had been shown a successful applicability with colour images

Robust Watermarking Schemes for Digital Images

With the rapid development of multimedia and the widespread distribution of digital data over the internet networks, it has become easy to obtain the intellectual properties. Consequently, the multimedia owners need more than ever before to protect their data and to prevent their unauthorized use. Digital watermarking has been proposed as an effective method for copyright protection and an unauthorized manipulation of the multimedia. Watermarking refers to the process of embedding an identification code or some other information called watermark into digital multimedia without affecting the visual quality of the host multimedia. Such a watermark can be used for several purposes including copyright protection and fingerprinting of the multimedia for tracing and data authentication. The goal in a watermarking scheme is to embed a watermark that is robust against various types of attacks while preserving the perceptual quality of the cover image. A variety of schemes have been proposed in the literature to achieve these goals for watermarking of images. These schemes either provide good imperceptibility of the watermark without sufficient resilience to certain types of attacks or provide good robustness against attacks at the expense of degraded perceptual quality of the cover images. The objective of this work is to develop image watermarking schemes with performance that is superior to those of existing schemes in terms of their robustness against various types of attacks while preserving the perceptual of the cover image. In this thesis, two new digital image watermarking schemes are proposed. In the first scheme, an Arnold transform integrated DCT-SVD based image watermarking scheme is developed. The main idea in this scheme is to improve the robustness of the watermarking further by scrambling the watermark data using the Arnold transform while still preserving the good perceptibility of the watermarked image furnished by a DCT-SVD based embedding. Also, it is shown that considerable savings in the computation time to recover the original watermark image can be provided by using the anti-Arnold transform in the watermark extraction process. In the second scheme, a DWT-SVD digital image watermarking scheme that makes use of visual cryptography to embed and extract a binary watermark image is developed. The use of visual cryptography in the proposed watermarking scheme is intended to provide improved robustness against attacks along with furnishing security to the content of the embedded data. Extensive experiments are conducted throughout this investigation in order to examine the performance of the proposed watermarking schemes. It is shown that the two proposed watermarking schemes developed in this thesis provide a performance superior to that of the existing schemes in terms of robustness against various types of attacks while preserving the perceptual quality of the cover image

Application Analyses of Visual Information Processing Techniques in E-Commerce

Digital visual information plays a very important role in E-Commerce (EC). Their usage brings forth many novel research topics for digital visual information processing skills and software. Some issues of application analysis of image/video information processing techniques suitable for EC are described in the paper. Visual design for goods or services trading, image retrieval based on visual contents, applications of images to the trade safety on the Internet, 3-dimensional display, virtual reality for goods browsing, inquiry based on image and video contents, trade safety and copyright protection of digital works based on digital watermarking are mainly discussed which are considered as the technological solutions that could enhance EC

Research on Digital Watermarking Algorithm for Anti-geometric Attack

For the problem that the traditional digital watermarking algorithm is less robustness against geometric attacks, this paper introduces the related content of digital watermarking technology, which combs digital watermarking technology, digital watermarking attack technology and digital watermarking evaluation method, and summarizes the improved algorithms proposed in recent years. Next, the traditional wavelet transform algorithm and the improved algorithm based on DCT transform are selected for comparison experiments. The latter combines Arnold scrambling and SVD decomposition, which has better shear resistance. Finally, combined with the research status, the future research focus of digital watermarking algorithm is prospected

DiffusionShield: A Watermark for Copyright Protection against Generative Diffusion Models

Recently, Generative Diffusion Models (GDMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities in learning and generating images. A large community of GDMs has naturally emerged, further promoting the diversified applications of GDMs in various fields. However, this unrestricted proliferation has raised serious concerns about copyright protection. For example, artists including painters and photographers are becoming increasingly concerned that GDMs could effortlessly replicate their unique creative works without authorization. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel watermarking scheme, DiffusionShield, tailored for GDMs. DiffusionShield protects images from copyright infringement by GDMs through encoding the ownership information into an imperceptible watermark and injecting it into the images. Its watermark can be easily learned by GDMs and will be reproduced in their generated images. By detecting the watermark from generated images, copyright infringement can be exposed with evidence. Benefiting from the uniformity of the watermarks and the joint optimization method, DiffusionShield ensures low distortion of the original image, high watermark detection performance, and the ability to embed lengthy messages. We conduct rigorous and comprehensive experiments to show the effectiveness of DiffusionShield in defending against infringement by GDMs and its superiority over traditional watermarking methods

An improved image steganography scheme based on distinction grade value and secret message encryption

Steganography is an emerging and greatly demanding technique for secure information communication over the internet using a secret cover object. It can be used for a wide range of applications such as safe circulation of secret data in intelligence, industry, health care, habitat, online voting, mobile banking and military. Commonly, digital images are used as covers for the steganography owing to their redundancy in the representation, making them hidden to the intruders, hackers, adversaries, unauthorized users. Still, any steganography system launched over the Internet can be cracked upon recognizing the stego cover. Thus, the undetectability that involves data imperceptibility or concealment and security is the significant trait of any steganography system. Presently, the design and development of an effective image steganography system are facing several challenges including low capacity, poor robustness and imperceptibility. To surmount such limitations, it is important to improve the capacity and security of the steganography system while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Based on these factors, this study is aimed to design and develop a distinction grade value (DGV) method to effectively embed the secret data into a cover image for achieving a robust steganography scheme. The design and implementation of the proposed scheme involved three phases. First, a new encryption method called the shuffle the segments of secret message (SSSM) was incorporated with an enhanced Huffman compression algorithm to improve the text security and payload capacity of the scheme. Second, the Fibonacci-based image transformation decomposition method was used to extend the pixel's bit from 8 to 12 for improving the robustness of the scheme. Third, an improved embedding method was utilized by integrating a random block/pixel selection with the DGV and implicit secret key generation for enhancing the imperceptibility of the scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme was assessed experimentally to determine the imperceptibility, security, robustness and capacity. The standard USC-SIPI images dataset were used as the benchmarking for the performance evaluation and comparison of the proposed scheme with the previous works. The resistance of the proposed scheme was tested against the statistical, X2 , Histogram and non-structural steganalysis detection attacks. The obtained PSNR values revealed the accomplishment of higher imperceptibility and security by the proposed DGV scheme while a higher capacity compared to previous works. In short, the proposed steganography scheme outperformed the commercially available data hiding schemes, thereby resolved the existing issues