Fragile Watermarking of 3D Models in Transformed Domain

This paper presents an algorithm aimed at the integrity protection of 3D models represented as a set of vertices and polygons. The proposed method defines a procedure to perform a fragile watermarking of the vertices’ data, namely 3D coordinates and polygons, introducing a very small error in the vertices’ coordinates. The watermark bit string is embedded into a secret vector space defined by the Karhunen–Loève transform derived from a key image. Experimental results show the good performance of the method and its security

Spread Spectrum Watermarking: Principles and Applications in Fading Channel

ISBN 978-953-51-0618-

Intelligent watermarking of long streams of document images

Digital watermarking has numerous applications in the imaging domain, including (but not limited to) fingerprinting, authentication, tampering detection. Because of the trade-off between watermark robustness and image quality, the heuristic parameters associated with digital watermarking systems need to be optimized. A common strategy to tackle this optimization problem formulation of digital watermarking, known as intelligent watermarking (IW), is to employ evolutionary computing (EC) to optimize these parameters for each image, with a computational cost that is infeasible for practical applications. However, in industrial applications involving streams of document images, one can expect instances of problems to reappear over time. Therefore, computational cost can be saved by preserving the knowledge of previous optimization problems in a separate archive (memory) and employing that memory to speedup or even replace optimization for future similar problems. That is the basic principle behind the research presented in this thesis. Although similarity in the image space can lead to similarity in the problem space, there is no guarantee of that and for this reason, knowledge about the image space should not be employed whatsoever. Therefore, in this research, strategies to appropriately represent, compare, store and sample from problem instances are investigated. The objective behind these strategies is to allow for a comprehensive representation of a stream of optimization problems in a way to avoid re-optimization whenever a previously seen problem provides solutions as good as those that would be obtained by reoptimization, but at a fraction of its cost. Another objective is to provide IW systems with a predictive capability which allows replacing costly fitness evaluations with cheaper regression models whenever re-optimization cannot be avoided. To this end, IW of streams of document images is first formulated as the problem of optimizing a stream of recurring problems and a Dynamic Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) technique is proposed to tackle this problem. This technique is based on a two-tiered memory of static solutions. Memory solutions are re-evaluated for every new image and then, the re-evaluated fitness distribution is compared with stored fitness distribution as a mean of measuring the similarity between both problem instances (change detection). In simulations involving homogeneous streams of bi-tonal document images, the proposed approach resulted in a decrease of 95% in computational burden with little impact in watermarking performace. Optimization cost was severely decreased by replacing re-optimizations with recall to previously seen solutions. After that, the problem of representing the stream of optimization problems in a compact manner is addressed. With that, new optimization concepts can be incorporated into previously learned concepts in an incremental fashion. The proposed strategy to tackle this problem is based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) representation, trained with parameter and fitness data of all intermediate (candidate) solutions of a given problem instance. GMM sampling replaces selection of individual memory solutions during change detection. Simulation results demonstrate that such memory of GMMs is more adaptive and can thus, better tackle the optimization of embedding parameters for heterogeneous streams of document images when compared to the approach based on memory of static solutions. Finally, the knowledge provided by the memory of GMMs is employed as a manner of decreasing the computational cost of re-optimization. To this end, GMM is employed in regression mode during re-optimization, replacing part of the costly fitness evaluations in a strategy known as surrogate-based optimization. Optimization is split in two levels, where the first one relies primarily on regression while the second one relies primarily on exact fitness values and provide a safeguard to the whole system. Simulation results demonstrate that the use of surrogates allows for better adaptation in situations involving significant variations in problem representation as when the set of attacks employed in the fitness function changes. In general lines, the intelligent watermarking system proposed in this thesis is well adapted for the optimization of streams of recurring optimization problems. The quality of the resulting solutions for both, homogeneous and heterogeneous image streams is comparable to that obtained through full optimization but for a fraction of its computational cost. More specifically, the number of fitness evaluations is 97% smaller than that of full optimization for homogeneous streams and 95% for highly heterogeneous streams of document images. The proposed method is general and can be easily adapted to other applications involving streams of recurring problems

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..

Deep Intellectual Property: A Survey

With the widespread application in industrial manufacturing and commercial services, well-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are becoming increasingly valuable and crucial assets due to the tremendous training cost and excellent generalization performance. These trained models can be utilized by users without much expert knowledge benefiting from the emerging ''Machine Learning as a Service'' (MLaaS) paradigm. However, this paradigm also exposes the expensive models to various potential threats like model stealing and abuse. As an urgent requirement to defend against these threats, Deep Intellectual Property (DeepIP), to protect private training data, painstakingly-tuned hyperparameters, or costly learned model weights, has been the consensus of both industry and academia. To this end, numerous approaches have been proposed to achieve this goal in recent years, especially to prevent or discover model stealing and unauthorized redistribution. Given this period of rapid evolution, the goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements in this field. More than 190 research contributions are included in this survey, covering many aspects of Deep IP Protection: challenges/threats, invasive solutions (watermarking), non-invasive solutions (fingerprinting), evaluation metrics, and performance. We finish the survey by identifying promising directions for future research.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figure

Méthodes de tatouage robuste pour la protection de l imagerie numerique 3D

La multiplication des contenus stéréoscopique augmente les risques de piratage numérique. La solution technologique par tatouage relève ce défi. En pratique, le défi d une approche de tatouage est d'atteindre l équilibre fonctionnel entre la transparence, la robustesse, la quantité d information insérée et le coût de calcul. Tandis que la capture et l'affichage du contenu 3D ne sont fondées que sur les deux vues gauche/droite, des représentations alternatives, comme les cartes de disparité devrait également être envisagée lors de la transmission/stockage. Une étude spécifique sur le domaine d insertion optimale devient alors nécessaire. Cette thèse aborde les défis mentionnés ci-dessus. Tout d'abord, une nouvelle carte de disparité (3D video-New Three Step Search- 3DV-SNSL) est développée. Les performances des 3DV-NTSS ont été évaluées en termes de qualité visuelle de l'image reconstruite et coût de calcul. En comparaison avec l'état de l'art (NTSS et FS-MPEG) des gains moyens de 2dB en PSNR et 0,1 en SSIM sont obtenus. Le coût de calcul est réduit par un facteur moyen entre 1,3 et 13. Deuxièmement, une étude comparative sur les principales classes héritées des méthodes de tatouage 2D et de leurs domaines d'insertion optimales connexes est effectuée. Quatre méthodes d'insertion appartenant aux familles SS, SI et hybride (Fast-IProtect) sont considérées. Les expériences ont mis en évidence que Fast-IProtect effectué dans la nouvelle carte de disparité (3DV-NTSS) serait suffisamment générique afin de servir une grande variété d'applications. La pertinence statistique des résultats est donnée par les limites de confiance de 95% et leurs erreurs relatives inférieurs er <0.1The explosion in stereoscopic video distribution increases the concerns over its copyright protection. Watermarking can be considered as the most flexible property right protection technology. The watermarking applicative issue is to reach the trade-off between the properties of transparency, robustness, data payload and computational cost. While the capturing and displaying of the 3D content are solely based on the two left/right views, some alternative representations, like the disparity maps should also be considered during transmission/storage. A specific study on the optimal (with respect to the above-mentioned properties) insertion domain is also required. The present thesis tackles the above-mentioned challenges. First, a new disparity map (3D video-New Three Step Search - 3DV-NTSS) is designed. The performances of the 3DV-NTSS were evaluated in terms of visual quality of the reconstructed image and computational cost. When compared with state of the art methods (NTSS and FS-MPEG) average gains of 2dB in PSNR and 0.1 in SSIM are obtained. The computational cost is reduced by average factors between 1.3 and 13. Second, a comparative study on the main classes of 2D inherited watermarking methods and on their related optimal insertion domains is carried out. Four insertion methods are considered; they belong to the SS, SI and hybrid (Fast-IProtect) families. The experiments brought to light that the Fast-IProtect performed in the new disparity map domain (3DV-NTSS) would be generic enough so as to serve a large variety of applications. The statistical relevance of the results is given by the 95% confidence limits and their underlying relative errors lower than er<0.1EVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

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

Rapid intelligent watermarking system for high-resolution grayscale facial images

Facial captures are widely used in many access control applications to authenticate individuals, and grant access to protected information and locations. For instance, in passport or smart card applications, facial images must be secured during the enrollment process, prior to exchange and storage. Digital watermarking may be used to assure integrity and authenticity of these facial images against unauthorized manipulations, through fragile and robust watermarking, respectively. It can also combine other biometric traits to be embedded as invisible watermarks in these facial captures to improve individual verification. Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques have been proposed to optimize watermark embedding parameters in IntelligentWatermarking (IW) literature. The goal of such optimization problem is to find the trade-off between conflicting objectives of watermark quality and robustness. Securing streams of high-resolution biometric facial captures results in a large number of optimization problems of high dimension search space. For homogeneous image streams, the optimal solutions for one image block can be utilized for other image blocks having the same texture features. Therefore, the computational complexity for handling a stream of high-resolution facial captures is significantly reduced by recalling such solutions from an associative memory instead of re-optimizing the whole facial capture image. In this thesis, an associative memory is proposed to store the previously calculated solutions for different categories of texture using the optimization results of the whole image for few training facial images. A multi-hypothesis approach is adopted to store in the associative memory the solutions for different clustering resolutions (number of blocks clusters based on texture features), and finally select the optimal clustering resolution based on the watermarking metrics for each facial image during generalization. This approach was verified using streams of facial captures from PUT database (Kasinski et al., 2008). It was compared against a baseline system representing traditional IW methods with full optimization for all stream images. Both proposed and baseline systems are compared with respect to quality of solution produced and the computational complexity measured in fitness evaluations. The proposed approach resulted in a decrease of 95.5% in computational burden with little impact in watermarking performance for a stream of 198 facial images. The proposed framework Blockwise Multi-Resolution Clustering (BMRC) has been published in Machine Vision and Applications (Rabil et al., 2013a) Although the stream of high dimensionality optimization problems are replaced by few training optimizations, and then recalls from an associative memory storing the training artifacts. Optimization problems with high dimensionality search space are challenging, complex, and can reach up to dimensionality of 49k variables represented using 293k bits for high-resolution facial images. In this thesis, this large dimensionality problem is decomposed into smaller problems representing image blocks which resolves convergence problems with handling the larger problem. Local watermarking metrics are used in cooperative coevolution on block level to reach the overall solution. The elitism mechanism is modified such that the blocks of higher local watermarking metrics are fetched across all candidate solutions for each position, and concatenated together to form the elite candidate solutions. This proposed approach resulted in resolving premature convergence for traditional EC methods, and thus 17% improvement on the watermarking fitness is accomplished for facial images of resolution 2048×1536. This improved fitness is achieved using few iterations implying optimization speedup. The proposed algorithm Blockwise Coevolutionary Genetic Algorithm (BCGA) has been published in Expert Systems with Applications (Rabil et al., 2013c). The concepts and frameworks presented in this thesis can be generalized on any stream of optimization problems with large search space, where the candidate solutions consist of smaller granularity problems solutions that affect the overall solution. The challenge for applying this approach is finding the significant feature for this smaller granularity that affects the overall optimization problem. In this thesis the texture features of smaller granularity blocks represented in the candidate solutions are affecting the watermarking fitness optimization of the whole image. Also the local metrics of these smaller granularity problems are indicating the fitness produced for the larger problem. Another proposed application for this thesis is to embed offline signature features as invisible watermark embedded in facial captures in passports to be used for individual verification during border crossing. The offline signature is captured from forms signed at borders and verified against the embedded features. The individual verification relies on one physical biometric trait represented by facial captures and another behavioral trait represented by offline signature

Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Framework for privacy-aware content distribution in peer-to- peer networks with copyright protection

The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for multimedia distribution has spread out globally in recent years. This mass popularity is primarily driven by the efficient distribution of content, also giving rise to piracy and copyright infringement as well as privacy concerns. An end user (buyer) of a P2P content distribution system does not want to reveal his/her identity during a transaction with a content owner (merchant), whereas the merchant does not want the buyer to further redistribute the content illegally. Therefore, there is a strong need for content distribution mechanisms over P2P networks that do not pose security and privacy threats to copyright holders and end users, respectively. However, the current systems being developed to provide copyright and privacy protection to merchants and end users employ cryptographic mechanisms, which incur high computational and communication costs, making these systems impractical for the distribution of big files, such as music albums or movies.El uso de soluciones de igual a igual (peer-to-peer, P2P) para la distribución multimedia se ha extendido mundialmente en los últimos años. La amplia popularidad de este paradigma se debe, principalmente, a la distribución eficiente de los contenidos, pero también da lugar a la piratería, a la violación del copyright y a problemas de privacidad. Un usuario final (comprador) de un sistema de distribución de contenidos P2P no quiere revelar su identidad durante una transacción con un propietario de contenidos (comerciante), mientras que el comerciante no quiere que el comprador pueda redistribuir ilegalmente el contenido más adelante. Por lo tanto, existe una fuerte necesidad de mecanismos de distribución de contenidos por medio de redes P2P que no supongan un riesgo de seguridad y privacidad a los titulares de derechos y los usuarios finales, respectivamente. Sin embargo, los sistemas actuales que se desarrollan con el propósito de proteger el copyright y la privacidad de los comerciantes y los usuarios finales emplean mecanismos de cifrado que implican unas cargas computacionales y de comunicaciones muy elevadas que convierten a estos sistemas en poco prácticos para distribuir archivos de gran tamaño, tales como álbumes de música o películas.L'ús de solucions d'igual a igual (peer-to-peer, P2P) per a la distribució multimèdia s'ha estès mundialment els darrers anys. L'àmplia popularitat d'aquest paradigma es deu, principalment, a la distribució eficient dels continguts, però també dóna lloc a la pirateria, a la violació del copyright i a problemes de privadesa. Un usuari final (comprador) d'un sistema de distribució de continguts P2P no vol revelar la seva identitat durant una transacció amb un propietari de continguts (comerciant), mentre que el comerciant no vol que el comprador pugui redistribuir il·legalment el contingut més endavant. Per tant, hi ha una gran necessitat de mecanismes de distribució de continguts per mitjà de xarxes P2P que no comportin un risc de seguretat i privadesa als titulars de drets i els usuaris finals, respectivament. Tanmateix, els sistemes actuals que es desenvolupen amb el propòsit de protegir el copyright i la privadesa dels comerciants i els usuaris finals fan servir mecanismes d'encriptació que impliquen unes càrregues computacionals i de comunicacions molt elevades que fan aquests sistemes poc pràctics per a distribuir arxius de grans dimensions, com ara àlbums de música o pel·lícules