Digital Watermarking as Content Protection Scheme

Nowadays, as the Internet grows rapidly, the copyright laws are not effective anymore, since a lot of copyrighted products (picture, audio, video, document, etc.) are available as digital data. Any unauthorized parties able to produce identical copies of digital data without degrading the original contents and to distribute the copies over the network. This condition has led to a strong demand for reliable and secure distribution of digital data over networks. Such a technique developed to overcome this problem is digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is a process in digital domain, which embeds a watermark into a copyrighted digital data, to protect its value, so that it cannot be used by unauthorized parties. This paper is intended to give an overview on digital watermarking. First, three application fields of watermarking are described and illustrated with some scenarios, namely watermarking for copyright protection, watermarking for copy protection, and watermarking for image authentication. Then watermarking techniques are discussed, starting from the basic watermarking procedure, followed by review of some watermarking techniques. And later, some attacks and obstacles to watermarking are highlighted. In conclusion, digital watermarking technology plays important role in content protection issues. Attacks and obstacles are also had to be faced by this technology. The main obstacle is that there is no standard available for watermarking techniques. Without any specific standard, it is difficult to determine how robust a watermarking technique should be

A HIGH SPEED VLSI ARCHITECTURE FOR DIGITAL SPEECH WATERMARKING WITH COMPRESSION

The need to provide a copy right protection on digital watermarking to multimedia data like speech, image or video is rapidly increasing with an intensification in the application in these areas. Digital watermarking has received a lot of attention in the past few years. A hardware system based solely on DSP processors are fast but may require more area, cost or power if the target application requires a large amount of parallel processing. An FPGA co-processor can provide as many as 550 parallel multiply and accumulate operations on a single device, but FPGAs excel at processing large amounts of data in parallel, as they are not optimized as processors for tasks such as periodic coefficient updates, decision- making control tasks. Combination of both the FPGA and DSP processor delivers an attractive solution for a wide range of applications. A hardware implementation of digital speech watermarking combined with speech compression, encryption on heterogeneous platform is made in this paper. It is observed that the proposed architecture is able to attain high speed while utilizing optimal resources in terms of area

REAL-TIME VIDEO WATERMARKING FOR COPYRIGHT PROTECTION BASED ON HUMAN PERCEPTION

There is a need for real-time copyright logo insertion in emerging applications, such as Internet protocol television (IPTV). This situation arises in IP-TV and digital TV broadcasting when video residing in a server has to be broadcast by different stations and under different broadcasting rights. Embedded systems that are involved in broadcasting need to have embedded copyright protection. Existing works are targeted towards invisible watermarking, not useful for logo insertion. MPEG-4 is the mainstream exchangeable video format in the Internet today because it has higher and flexible compression rate, lower bit rate, and higher efficiency while superior visual quality.The main steps for MPEG-4 are color space conversion and sampling, DCT and its inverse (IDCT), quantization, zigzag scanning, motion estimation, and entropy coding. In this work a watermarking algorithm that performs the broadcaster\u27s logo insertion as watermark in the DCT domain is been presented. The robustness of DCT watermarking arises from the fact that if an attack tries to remove watermarking at mid frequencies, it will risk degrading the fidelity of the image\video because some perceptive details are at mid frequencies. The suggested methods has implemented in matlab

Blind Video Watermarking Scheme for Mpeg-4 Videos with Parity Sequences in Transform Domain

High quality video broad casting is of high demand both with DVB-2 (Digital Video Broad casting) and Internet services. But these broadcasted data is distributed without protection. Invisible mode of video watermarking is one of the solutions, here in this paper a novel approach of data embedding scheme is proposed for MPEG-4 videos with different parity check codes and processed in transform domain. A subjective and objective analysis is performed to examine the proposed approach. Experimental results on various videos have shown that LDPC (Low density parity check) code with Gold spreading sequence in transform domain outperforms when compared against the other methods

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

Development Of A Robust Blind Digital Video Watermarking Algorithm Using Discrete Wavelet Transform

Video watermarking technology enables us to hide an imperceptible, robust, and secure data in digital or analog video. This data can be used for tracking, fingerprinting, copyright infringement detection or any other application that requires some hidden data. Video watermarking can be achieved by either applying still image technologies to each frame of the movie or by using dedicated methods which exploit inherent features of the video sequence. There is a complex trade-off between three requirements in digital watermarking: robustness against noise and attacks, imperceptibility or invisibility, and capacity, which represent the amount of data, i.e., the number of bits encoded by the watermark. However, these three requirements conflict with each other. Increasing the watermark strength makes the system more robust but unfortunately decreases the perceptual quality. Whereas, increasing the capacity of the watermark decreases the robustness.In the production chain, video compression is usually applied before broadcasting or before transferring the video to other devices. In order to be robust against format conversions, the watermark has to be inserted before compression. Therefore, uncompressed video format has been used in the research undertaken. On the other hand, a random key is used to choose the frames to be watermarked to increase the security level of the algorithm and discourage piracy. The aim of this research is to develop a video watermarking algorithm to embed a binary image inside the uncoded video stream that acts as a logo. A mid-band discrete wavelet transform coefficients of the selected frames are chosen to be the hosted region in the frequency domain. An inverse transformation should be taken in order to get the desired watermarked video shot. In extraction process the watermark is extracted from the marked video directly without access to the original video. The experiment results showed that the proposed scheme provides better quality watermarked videos in term of watermark invisibility to human eyes. Results also indicated that obtaining average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) equals 41.59dB as compared with 38.48dB in the case of direct embedding. In addition, the scheme is robust against video processing operations, such as MPEG compression which could be successfully recovered. In conclusion, modifying the wavelet coefficients depending only on the logo object's pixels highly improve the invisibility and at the same time providing a good robustness level