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

New watermarking methods for digital images.

The phenomenal spread of the Internet places an enormous demand on content-ownership-validation. In this thesis, four new image-watermarking methods are presented. One method is based on discrete-wavelet-transformation (DWT) only while the rest are based on DWT and singular-value-decomposition (SVD) ensemble. The main target for this thesis is to reach a new blind-watermarking-method. Method IV presents such watermark using QR-codes. The use of QR-codes in watermarking is novel. The choice of such application is based on the fact that QR-Codes have errors self-correction-capability of 5% or higher which satisfies the nature of digital-image-processing. Results show that the proposed-methods introduced minimal distortion to the watermarked images as compared to other methods and are robust against JPEG, resizing and other attacks. Moreover, watermarking-method-II provides a solution to the detection of false watermark in the literature. Finally, method IV presents a new QR-code guided watermarking-approach that can be used as a steganography as well. --Leaf ii.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b183575

Machine learning based digital image forensics and steganalysis

The security and trustworthiness of digital images have become crucial issues due to the simplicity of malicious processing. Therefore, the research on image steganalysis (determining if a given image has secret information hidden inside) and image forensics (determining the origin and authenticity of a given image and revealing the processing history the image has gone through) has become crucial to the digital society. In this dissertation, the steganalysis and forensics of digital images are treated as pattern classification problems so as to make advanced machine learning (ML) methods applicable. Three topics are covered: (1) architectural design of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for steganalysis, (2) statistical feature extraction for camera model classification, and (3) real-world tampering detection and localization. For covert communications, steganography is used to embed secret messages into images by altering pixel values slightly. Since advanced steganography alters the pixel values in the image regions that are hard to be detected, the traditional ML-based steganalytic methods heavily relied on sophisticated manual feature design have been pushed to the limit. To overcome this difficulty, in-depth studies are conducted and reported in this dissertation so as to move the success achieved by the CNNs in computer vision to steganalysis. The outcomes achieved and reported in this dissertation are: (1) a proposed CNN architecture incorporating the domain knowledge of steganography and steganalysis, and (2) ensemble methods of the CNNs for steganalysis. The proposed CNN is currently one of the best classifiers against steganography. Camera model classification from images aims at assigning a given image to its source capturing camera model based on the statistics of image pixel values. For this, two types of statistical features are designed to capture the traces left by in-camera image processing algorithms. The first is Markov transition probabilities modeling block-DCT coefficients for JPEG images; the second is based on histograms of local binary patterns obtained in both the spatial and wavelet domains. The designed features serve as the input to train support vector machines, which have the best classification performance at the time the features are proposed. The last part of this dissertation documents the solutions delivered by the author’s team to The First Image Forensics Challenge organized by the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. In the competition, all the fake images involved were doctored by popular image-editing software to simulate the real-world scenario of tampering detection (determine if a given image has been tampered or not) and localization (determine which pixels have been tampered). In Phase-1 of the Challenge, advanced steganalysis features were successfully migrated to tampering detection. In Phase-2 of the Challenge, an efficient copy-move detector equipped with PatchMatch as a fast approximate nearest neighbor searching method were developed to identify duplicated regions within images. With these tools, the author’s team won the runner-up prizes in both the two phases of the Challenge

Steganography A Data Hiding Technique

Steganography implements an encryption technique in which communication takes place by hiding information. A hidden message is the combination of a secret message with the carrier message. This technique can be used to hide the message in an image, a video file, an audio file or in a file system. There are large variety of steganography techniques that will be used for hiding secret information in images. The final output image is called as a stego-image which consists of a secret message or information. Imperceptibility, payload, and robustness are three most important parameters for audio steganography. For a more secure approach, encryption can be used, which will encrypt the secret message using a secret key and then sent to the receiver. The receiver after receiving the message then decrypts the secret message to obtain the original one. In this paper, compared steganography with cryptography, which is an encrypting technique and explained how steganography provides better security in terms of hiding the secret message. In this paper, the various techniques are illustrated, which are used in steganography and studying the implementation of those techniques. Also, demonstrated the implementation process of one of the steganography techniques. A comparative analysis is performed between various steganographic tools by using the sample test images and test data. The quality metrics such as PSNR and SSIM are calculated for the final output images which are used for rating the tools. This paper also discusses about the Steganalysis which is known as the process of identifying the use of steganography

WAVELET BASED DATA HIDING OF DEM IN THE CONTEXT OF REALTIME 3D VISUALIZATION (Visualisation 3D Temps-Réel à Distance de MNT par Insertion de Données Cachées Basée Ondelettes)

The use of aerial photographs, satellite images, scanned maps and digital elevation models necessitates the setting up of strategies for the storage and visualization of these data. In order to obtain a three dimensional visualization it is necessary to drape the images, called textures, onto the terrain geometry, called Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Practically, all these information are stored in three different files: DEM, texture and position/projection of the data in a geo-referential system. In this paper we propose to stock all these information in a single file for the purpose of synchronization. For this we have developed a wavelet-based embedding method for hiding the data in a colored image. The texture images containing hidden DEM data can then be sent from the server to a client in order to effect 3D visualization of terrains. The embedding method is integrable with the JPEG2000 coder to accommodate compression and multi-resolution visualization. Résumé L'utilisation de photographies aériennes, d'images satellites, de cartes scannées et de modèles numériques de terrains amène à mettre en place des stratégies de stockage et de visualisation de ces données. Afin d'obtenir une visualisation en trois dimensions, il est nécessaire de lier ces images appelées textures avec la géométrie du terrain nommée Modèle Numérique de Terrain (MNT). Ces informations sont en pratiques stockées dans trois fichiers différents : MNT, texture, position et projection des données dans un système géo-référencé. Dans cet article, nous proposons de stocker toutes ces informations dans un seul fichier afin de les synchroniser. Nous avons développé pour cela une méthode d'insertion de données cachées basée ondelettes dans une image couleur. Les images de texture contenant les données MNT cachées peuvent ensuite être envoyées du serveur au client afin d'effectuer une visualisation 3D de terrains. Afin de combiner une visualisation en multirésolution et une compression, l'insertion des données cachées est intégrable dans le codeur JPEG 2000

Recent Advances in Steganography

Steganography is the art and science of communicating which hides the existence of the communication. Steganographic technologies are an important part of the future of Internet security and privacy on open systems such as the Internet. This book's focus is on a relatively new field of study in Steganography and it takes a look at this technology by introducing the readers various concepts of Steganography and Steganalysis. The book has a brief history of steganography and it surveys steganalysis methods considering their modeling techniques. Some new steganography techniques for hiding secret data in images are presented. Furthermore, steganography in speeches is reviewed, and a new approach for hiding data in speeches is introduced

Review Paper on Image and Video Based Steganography

مع التطور الكبير في تقنيات المعلومات الإلكترونية والشبكات ، وفي ضوء بعض الظروف التي تفرض العمل على الإنترنت ، والتي تعتبر بيئة غير آمنة للمعلومات السرية ، أصبح الحفاظ على أمن البيانات ذات أولوية مهمة. من أهم التقنيات المستخدمة للحفاظ على سرية البيانات المنقولة وعدم إخضاعها للمهاجمين هي الإخفاء والتشفير ، وتعتمد هاتان التقنيتان أيضًا على الوسيط الذي ينقل البيانات السرية ، سواء كان ملف صورة أو صوت أو فيديو. علم إخفاء المعلومات هو علم دمج البيانات الرقمية بطريقة لا يمكن لأحد الشك في وجودها. التشفير هو تقنية أخرى تستخدم لحماية البيانات ، عند استخدامه مع إخفاء المعلومات يزيد من قوة حماية المعلومات. تقدم هذه الورقة لمحة عامة عن تقنيات إخفاء المعلومات النصية داخل ملفات الصور والفيديو. تهدف هذه الدراسة إلى تقديم ملخص للطريقة الأكثر أمانًا وأمانًا وقدرة حمولتها على إخفاء البيانات.With the great development in electronic and network information technologies, and in light of some circumstances that impose work on the Internet, which is considered to be an insecure environment for confidential information, therefore maintaining data security has become an important priority. The most important techniques used to maintain the confidentiality of the transferred data and not subject it to attackers are concealment and encryption, and these two technologies also depend on the medium that transmits the secret data, whether it is an image file, sound or video. Steganography is the science of embedding digital data in such a way no one can doubt its existence. Encryption is another technology used to protect data, when used with steganography increases the power of information protection. This paper provides an overview of techniques for hiding textual information within image and video files. This study aims to provide a summary of the method that is safer, more secure, and the ability of its payload to hide data

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