2,491 research outputs found
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 constructive and unifying framework for zero-bit watermarking
In the watermark detection scenario, also known as zero-bit watermarking, a
watermark, carrying no hidden message, is inserted in content. The watermark
detector checks for the presence of this particular weak signal in content. The
article looks at this problem from a classical detection theory point of view,
but with side information enabled at the embedding side. This means that the
watermark signal is a function of the host content. Our study is twofold. The
first step is to design the best embedding function for a given detection
function, and the best detection function for a given embedding function. This
yields two conditions, which are mixed into one `fundamental' partial
differential equation. It appears that many famous watermarking schemes are
indeed solution to this `fundamental' equation. This study thus gives birth to
a constructive framework unifying solutions, so far perceived as very
different.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Securit
Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions
An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect
undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of
the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have
exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical
test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such
steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been
proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that
communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our
basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.)
covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public
watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the
code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We
derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure
steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code
length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the
potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security
requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1
steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order
marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss
occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is
cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized
linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally
secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore
Version 2 as the file was corrupte
Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions
An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect
undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of
the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have
exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical
test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such
steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been
proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that
communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our
basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.)
covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public
watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the
code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We
derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure
steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code
length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the
potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security
requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1
steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order
marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss
occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is
cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized
linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally
secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore
Version 2 as the file was corrupte
Lime: Data Lineage in the Malicious Environment
Intentional or unintentional leakage of confidential data is undoubtedly one
of the most severe security threats that organizations face in the digital era.
The threat now extends to our personal lives: a plethora of personal
information is available to social networks and smartphone providers and is
indirectly transferred to untrustworthy third party and fourth party
applications.
In this work, we present a generic data lineage framework LIME for data flow
across multiple entities that take two characteristic, principal roles (i.e.,
owner and consumer). We define the exact security guarantees required by such a
data lineage mechanism toward identification of a guilty entity, and identify
the simplifying non repudiation and honesty assumptions. We then develop and
analyze a novel accountable data transfer protocol between two entities within
a malicious environment by building upon oblivious transfer, robust
watermarking, and signature primitives. Finally, we perform an experimental
evaluation to demonstrate the practicality of our protocol
Watermarking for multimedia security using complex wavelets
This paper investigates the application of complex wavelet transforms to the field of digital data hiding. Complex wavelets offer improved directional selectivity and shift invariance over their discretely sampled counterparts allowing for better adaptation of watermark distortions to the host media. Two methods of deriving visual models for the watermarking system are adapted to the complex wavelet transforms and their performances are compared. To produce improved capacity a spread transform embedding algorithm is devised, this combines the robustness of spread spectrum methods with the high capacity of quantization based methods. Using established information theoretic methods, limits of watermark capacity are derived that demonstrate the superiority of complex wavelets over discretely sampled wavelets. Finally results for the algorithm against commonly used attacks demonstrate its robustness and the improved performance offered by complex wavelet transforms
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