Robust Object-Based Watermarking Using SURF Feature Matching and DFT Domain

In this paper we propose a robust object-based watermarking method, in which the watermark is embedded into the middle frequencies band of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) magnitude of the selected object region, altogether with the Speeded Up Robust Feature (SURF) algorithm to allow the correct watermark detection, even if the watermarked image has been distorted. To recognize the selected object region after geometric distortions, during the embedding process the SURF features are estimated and stored in advance to be used during the detection process. In the detection stage, the SURF features of the distorted image are estimated and match them with the stored ones. From the matching result, SURF features are used to compute the Affine-transformation parameters and the object region is recovered. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and the Visual Information Fidelity (VIF). The experimental results show the proposed method provides robustness against several geometric distortions, signal processing operations and combined distortions. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves also show the desirable detection performance of the proposed method. The comparison with a previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided

A Robust Image Hashing Algorithm Resistant Against Geometrical Attacks

This paper proposes a robust image hashing method which is robust against common image processing attacks and geometric distortion attacks. In order to resist against geometric attacks, the log-polar mapping (LPM) and contourlet transform are employed to obtain the low frequency sub-band image. Then the sub-band image is divided into some non-overlapping blocks, and low and middle frequency coefficients are selected from each block after discrete cosine transform. The singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied in each block to obtain the first digit of the maximum singular value. Finally, the features are scrambled and quantized as the safe hash bits. Experimental results show that the algorithm is not only resistant against common image processing attacks and geometric distortion attacks, but also discriminative to content changes

Optimal Radiometric Calibration for Camera-Display Communication

We present a novel method for communicating between a camera and display by embedding and recovering hidden and dynamic information within a displayed image. A handheld camera pointed at the display can receive not only the display image, but also the underlying message. These active scenes are fundamentally different from traditional passive scenes like QR codes because image formation is based on display emittance, not surface reflectance. Detecting and decoding the message requires careful photometric modeling for computational message recovery. Unlike standard watermarking and steganography methods that lie outside the domain of computer vision, our message recovery algorithm uses illumination to optically communicate hidden messages in real world scenes. The key innovation of our approach is an algorithm that performs simultaneous radiometric calibration and message recovery in one convex optimization problem. By modeling the photometry of the system using a camera-display transfer function (CDTF), we derive a physics-based kernel function for support vector machine classification. We demonstrate that our method of optimal online radiometric calibration (OORC) leads to an efficient and robust algorithm for computational messaging between nine commercial cameras and displays.Comment: 10 pages, Submitted to CVPR 201

A Localized Geometric-Distortion Resilient Digital Watermarking Scheme Using Two Kinds of Complementary Feature Points

With the rapid development of digital multimedia and internet techniques in the last few years, more and more digital images are being distributed to an ever-growing number of people for sharing, studying, or other purposes. Sharing images digitally is fast and cost-efficient thus highly desirable. However, most of those digital products are exposed without any protection. Thus, without authorization, such information can be easily transferred, copied, and tampered with by using digital multimedia editing software. Watermarking is a popular resolution to the strong need of copyright protection of digital multimedia. In the image forensics scenario, a digital watermark can be used as a tool to discriminate whether original content is tampered with or not. It is embedded on digital images as an invisible message and is used to demonstrate the proof by the owner. In this thesis, we propose a novel localized geometric-distortion resilient digital watermarking scheme to embed two invisible messages to images. Our proposed scheme utilizes two complementary watermarking techniques, namely, local circular region (LCR)-based techniques and block discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based techniques, to hide two pseudo-random binary sequences in two kinds of regions and extract these two sequences from their individual embedding regions. To this end, we use the histogram and mean statistically independent of the pixel position to embed one watermark in the LCRs, whose centers are the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature points themselves that are robust against various affine transformations and common image processing attacks. This watermarking technique combines the advantages of SIFT feature point extraction, local histogram computing, and blind watermark embedding and extraction in the spatial domain to resist geometric distortions. We also use Watson’s DCT-based visual model to embed the other watermark in several rich textured 80×80 regions not covered by any embedding LCR. This watermarking technique combines the advantages of Harris feature point extraction, triangle tessellation and matching, the human visual system (HVS), the spread spectrum-based blind watermark embedding and extraction. The proposed technique then uses these combined features in a DCT domain to resist common image processing attacks and to reduce the watermark synchronization problem at the same time. These two techniques complement each other and therefore can resist geometric and common image processing attacks robustly. Our proposed watermarking approach is a robust watermarking technique that is capable of resisting geometric attacks, i.e., affine transformation (rotation, scaling, and translation) attacks and other common image processing (e.g., JPEG compression and filtering operations) attacks. It demonstrates more robustness and better performance as compared with some peer systems in the literature

Print-Scan Resilient Text Image Watermarking Based on Stroke Direction Modulation for Chinese Document Authentication

Print-scan resilient watermarking has emerged as an attractive way for document security. This paper proposes an stroke direction modulation technique for watermarking in Chinese text images. The watermark produced by the idea offers robustness to print-photocopy-scan, yet provides relatively high embedding capacity without losing the transparency. During the embedding phase, the angle of rotatable strokes are quantized to embed the bits. This requires several stages of preprocessing, including stroke generation, junction searching, rotatable stroke decision and character partition. Moreover, shuffling is applied to equalize the uneven embedding capacity. For the data detection, denoising and deskewing mechanisms are used to compensate for the distortions induced by hardcopy. Experimental results show that our technique attains high detection accuracy against distortions resulting from print-scan operations, good quality photocopies and benign attacks in accord with the future goal of soft authentication

A Survey on Recent Reversible Watermarking Techniques

Watermarking is a technique to protect the copyright of digital media such as image, text, music and movie. Reversible watermarking is a technique in which watermark can be removed to completely restore the original image. Reversible watermarking of digital content allows full extraction of the watermark along with the complete restoration of the original image. For the last few years, reversible watermarking techniques are gaining popularity due to its applications in important and sensitive areas like military communication, healthcare, and law-enforcement. Due to the rapid evolution of reversible watermarking techniques, a latest review of recent research in this field is highly desirable. In this survey, the performances of different latest reversible watermarking techniques are discussed on the basis of various characteristics of watermarking

A Novel DWT-Based Watermarking for Image with The SIFT

A kind of scale invariant features transformation (SIFT for short) operators on DWT domain are proposed for watermarking algorithm. Firstly, the low frequency of the image is obtained by DWT. And then the SIFT transformation is used to calculate the key feature points for the low frequency sub-image. Based on the chosen space’s key points with moderate scale, a circular area as watermark embedding area is constructed. According to the research and final results, the novel digital watermark algorithm is proposed benefiting from the characteristics of SIFT’s key points and local time-frequency of DWT. The algorithm not only has good robustness to resist on such operations as compression, shearing, noise addition, median filtering and scaling, but also has good inhibition to possible watermark fake verification