On robustness against JPEG2000: a performance evaluation of wavelet-based watermarking techniques

With the emergence of new scalable coding standards, such as JPEG2000, multimedia is stored as scalable coded bit streams that may be adapted to cater network, device and usage preferences in multimedia usage chains providing universal multimedia access. These adaptations include quality, resolution, frame rate and region of interest scalability and achieved by discarding least significant parts of the bit stream according to the scalability criteria. Such content adaptations may also affect the content protection data, such as watermarks, hidden in the original content. Many wavelet-based robust watermarking techniques robust to such JPEG2000 compression attacks are proposed in the literature. In this paper, we have categorized and evaluated the robustness of such wavelet-based image watermarking techniques against JPEG2000 compression, in terms of algorithmic choices, wavelet kernel selection, subband selection, or watermark selection using a new modular framework. As most of the algorithms use a different set of parametric combination, this analysis is particularly useful to understand the effect of various parameters on the robustness under a common platform and helpful to design any such new algorithm. The analysis also considers the imperceptibility performance of the watermark embedding, as robustness and imperceptibility are two main watermarking properties, complementary to each other

Scalable watermark extraction for real-time authentication of JPEG 2000 images

This paper proposes a novel scalable authentication scheme that utilizes the progressive enhancement functionality in JPEG 2000 scalable image coding. The proposed method first models the wavelet-based quality scalable coding to identify the effect of the quantization and de-quantization on wavelet coefficient magnitudes and the data embedded within such coefficients as a watermark. A relationship is then established between the watermark extraction rule and the embedding rule, using the magnitudes of the reconstructed and original coefficients. It ranks the wavelet coefficients according to their ability to retain the embedded watermark data intact under various quantization levels corresponding to quality enhancements. Then watermark data is embedded into wavelet coefficients according to their rank followed by JPEG 2000 embedded coding. At the decoder as more and more quality and resolution layers are decoded the authentication metric is improved, thus resulting in gradually increasing complexity of the authentication process according to the number of quality and resolution enhancements. The low complexity authentication is available at low quality low resolution decoding, enabling real-time authentication for resource constrained applications without affecting the authentication metric. Compared to the existing methods, the proposed method results in highly robust scalable authentication of JPEG 2000 coded images

Co-histogram and Image Degradation Evaluation

The tool for image degradation evaluation addressed in this paper is called co-histogram, which is a statistic graph generated by counting the corresponding pixel pairs of two images. The graph is a two-dimensional joint probability distribution of the two images. A co-histogram shows how the pixels are distributed among combinations of two image pixel values. By means of co-histogram, we can have a visual understanding of PSNR, and the symmetry of a co-histogram is also significant for objective evaluation of image degradation. Our experiments with image degradation models of image compression, convolution blurring and geometric distortion perform the importance of the co-histogram.Computer Science, Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science, Theory & MethodsImaging Science & Photographic TechnologySCI(E)CPCI-S(ISTP)

Real-Time Optimized Error Protection Assignment for Scalable Image and Video over Wireless Channels

A new error protection assignment scheme with applications to real-time wireless multimedia transmission is presented. The proposed scheme exploits the structure of scalable sources to ensure optimal assignment. This novel approach recasts the nonlinear optimization problem into a linear one, and then further remodels it into a discrete programming problem, thereby reducing the computational complexity dramatically. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm does not impose any requirement on the convexity of the source; i.e., it can equally be applied on a convex or nonconvex source. Results show that the described method facilitates a significant complexity reduction with respect to existing schemes, while exhibiting almost equivalent performance