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

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

A Robust Algorithm of Digital Image Watermarking Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform

In this paper, a robust algorithm of digital image watermarking based on discrete wavelet transform is introduced It uses blind watermarking technique. Digital image watermarking is one such technology that has been developed to protect digital images from illegal manipulations. In particular, digital image watermarking algorithms which are based on the discrete wavelet transform have been widely recognized to be more prevalent than others. This is due to the wavelets\u27 excellent spatial localization, frequency spread, and multi-resolution characteristics, which are similar to the theoretical models of the human visual system

Improving digital watermarking fidelity using fast neural network for adaptive wavelet synthesis

This paper introduces a new adaptive algorithm for digital watermark embedding in wavelet domain. The proposed algorithm performs adaptive mother wavelet synthesis based on a low frequency component energy maximization. The algorithm is based on an orthogonal neural network. We demonstrate that the presented adaptive method can improve both the correlation between an extracted watermark and an embedded watermark, as well as the fidelity of an image. The proposed algorithm is applied to improve well known wavelet based embedding algorithms

Fingerprint Authentication by Wavelet-based Digital Watermarking

In this manuscript, a wavelet-based blind watermarking scheme has been proposed as a means to provide protection against false matching of a possibly tampered fingerprint by embedding a binary name label of the fingerprint owner in the fingerprint itself. Embedding watermarks in the detail regions allow us to increase the robustness of our watermark, at little to no additional impact on image quality. It has been experimentally shown that when a binary watermark is embedded into detail coefficients of an indexed fingerprint image in a spread spectrum fashion, the perceptual invisibility and robustness have anticlinal response to change in amplification factor “K” and smaller watermarks have better transparency than the larger ones. The DWT-based technique has been found to give better robustness against noises, geometrical distortions, filtering and JPEG compression attack than other frequency domain watermarking techniques.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v2i4.50