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

Reversible color video watermarking scheme based on hybrid of integer-to-integer wavelet transform and Arnold transform

Unauthorized redistribution and illegal copying of digital contents are serious issues which have affected numerous types of digital contents such as digital video. One of the methods, which have been suggested to support copyright protection, is to hide digital watermark within the digital video. This paper introduces a new video watermarking system which based on a combination of Arnold transform and integer wavelet transforms (IWT). IWT is employed to decompose the cover video frames whereby Arnold transform is used to scramble the watermark which is a grey scale image. Scrambling the watermark before the concealment makes the transmission more secure by disordering the information. The system performance was benchmarked against related video watermarking schemes, in which the evaluation processes consist of testing against several video operations and attacks. Consequently, the scheme has been demonstrated to be perfectly robust

High capacity data embedding schemes for digital media

High capacity image data hiding methods and robust high capacity digital audio watermarking algorithms are studied in this thesis. The main results of this work are the development of novel algorithms with state-of-the-art performance, high capacity and transparency for image data hiding and robustness, high capacity and low distortion for audio watermarking.En esta tesis se estudian y proponen diversos métodos de data hiding de imágenes y watermarking de audio de alta capacidad. Los principales resultados de este trabajo consisten en la publicación de varios algoritmos novedosos con rendimiento a la altura de los mejores métodos del estado del arte, alta capacidad y transparencia, en el caso de data hiding de imágenes, y robustez, alta capacidad y baja distorsión para el watermarking de audio.En aquesta tesi s'estudien i es proposen diversos mètodes de data hiding d'imatges i watermarking d'àudio d'alta capacitat. Els resultats principals d'aquest treball consisteixen en la publicació de diversos algorismes nous amb rendiment a l'alçada dels millors mètodes de l'estat de l'art, alta capacitat i transparència, en el cas de data hiding d'imatges, i robustesa, alta capacitat i baixa distorsió per al watermarking d'àudio.Societat de la informació i el coneixemen

Study and Implementation of Watermarking Algorithms

Water Making is the process of embedding data called a watermark into a multimedia object such that watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the object. The object may be an audio, image or video. A copy of a digital image is identical to the original. This has in many instances, led to the use of digital content with malicious intent. One way to protect multimedia data against illegal recording and retransmission is to embed a signal, called digital signature or copyright label or watermark that authenticates the owner of the data. Data hiding, schemes to embed secondary data in digital media, have made considerable progress in recent years and attracted attention from both academia and industry. Techniques have been proposed for a variety of applications, including ownership protection, authentication and access control. Imperceptibility, robustness against moderate processing such as compression, and the ability to hide many bits are the basic but rat..

Cognitive computation of compressed sensing for watermark signal measurement

As an important tool for protecting multimedia contents, scrambling and randomizing of original messages is used in generating digital watermark for satisfying security requirements. Based on the neural perception of high-dimensional data, compressed sensing (CS) is proposed as a new technique in watermarking for improved security and reduced computational complexity. In our proposed methodology, watermark signal is extracted from the CS of the Hadamard measurement matrix. Through construction of the scrambled block Hadamard matrix utilizing a cryptographic key, encrypting the watermark signal in CS domain is achieved without any additional computation required. The extensive experiments have shown that the neural inspired CS mechanism can generate watermark signal of higher security, yet it still maintains a better trade-off between transparency and robustness

AN APPROACH TOWARDS EFFICIENT VIDEO DATA HIDING USING PROHIBITED ZONE

The process of embedding information into a host medium is a data hiding. In general, due to their wide presence and the tolerance of human perceptual systems involved visual and arual media are preferred. The methods vary depending on the nature of such media and the general structure of data hiding process does not depend on the host media type. Due to the design complexities involved video data hiding is still an important research topic. A new video data hiding method that makes use of removal correction capabilities of replicate accumulate codes and advantage of prohibited zone data hiding is proposed in this paper. To determine host signal samples suitable for data hiding selective embedding is utilized in the proposed method. In order to withstand frame drop and insert attacks a temporal synchronization scheme is contained in this method. By typical broadcast material against MPEG- 2, H.264 compression, frame-rate renovation attacks, as well as other renowned video data hiding methods the proposed framework is tested here. For typical system parameters the decoding error values are reported. The imitation results specify that the frame can be effectively utilized in video data hiding applications

A study and some experimental work of digital image and video watermarking

The rapid growth of digitized media and the emergence of digital networks have created a pressing need for copyright protection and anonymous communications schemes. Digital watermarking (or data hiding in a more general term) is a kind of steganography technique by adding information into a digital data stream. Several most important watermarking schemes applied to multilevel and binary still images and digital videos were studied. They include schemes based on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform), and fractal transforms. The question whether these invisible watermarking techniques can resolve the issue of rightful ownership of intellectual properties was discussed. The watermarking schemes were further studied from malicious attack point of view, which is considered an effective way to advance the watermarking techniques. In particular, the StirMark robustness tests based on geometrical distortion were carried out. A binary watermarking scheme applied in the DCT domain is presented in this research project. The effect of the binarization procedure necessarily encountered in dealing with binary document images is found so strong that most of conventional embedding schemes fail in dealing with watermarking of binary document images. Some particular measures have to be taken. The initial simulation results indicate that the proposed technique is promising though further efforts need to be made

Robust digital watermarking techniques for multimedia protection

The growing problem of the unauthorized reproduction of digital multimedia data such as movies, television broadcasts, and similar digital products has triggered worldwide efforts to identify and protect multimedia contents. Digital watermarking technology provides law enforcement officials with a forensic tool for tracing and catching pirates. Watermarking refers to the process of adding a structure called a watermark to an original data object, which includes digital images, video, audio, maps, text messages, and 3D graphics. Such a watermark can be used for several purposes including copyright protection, fingerprinting, copy protection, broadcast monitoring, data authentication, indexing, and medical safety. The proposed thesis addresses the problem of multimedia protection and consists of three parts. In the first part, we propose new image watermarking algorithms that are robust against a wide range of intentional and geometric attacks, flexible in data embedding, and computationally fast. The core idea behind our proposed watermarking schemes is to use transforms that have different properties which can effectively match various aspects of the signal's frequencies. We embed the watermark many times in all the frequencies to provide better robustness against attacks and increase the difficulty of destroying the watermark. The second part of the thesis is devoted to a joint exploitation of the geometry and topology of 3D objects and its subsequent application to 3D watermarking. The key idea consists of capturing the geometric structure of a 3D mesh in the spectral domain by computing the eigen-decomposition of the mesh Laplacian matrix. We also use the fact that the global shape features of a 3D model may be reconstructed using small low-frequency spectral coefficients. The eigen-analysis of the mesh Laplacian matrix is, however, prohibitively expensive. To lift this limitation, we first partition the 3D mesh into smaller 3D sub-meshes, and then we repeat the watermark embedding process as much as possible in the spectral coefficients of the compressed 3D sub-meshes. The visual error of the watermarked 3D model is evaluated by computing a nonlinear visual error metric between the original 3D model and the watermarked model obtained by our proposed algorithm. The third part of the thesis is devoted to video watermarking. We propose robust, hybrid scene-based MPEG video watermarking techniques based on a high-order tensor singular value decomposition of the video image sequences. The key idea behind our approaches is to use the scene change analysis to embed the watermark repeatedly in a fixed number of the intra-frames. These intra-frames are represented as 3D tensors with two dimensions in space and one dimension in time. We embed the watermark information in the singular values of these high-order tensors, which have good stability and represent the video properties. Illustration of numerical experiments with synthetic and real data are provided to demonstrate the potential and the much improved performance of the proposed algorithms in multimedia watermarking