Resolving rightful ownerships with invisible watermarking techniques: limitations, attacks, and implications

The transition from analog technologies to digital technologies has increased the ever-growing concern for protection and authentication of digital content and data. Owners of digital content of any type are seeking and exploring new technologies for the protection of copyrighted multimedia content. Multimedia protection has become an issue in recent years, and to deal with this issue, researchers are continuously searching for and exploring new effective and efficient technologies. This thesis study has been prepared in order to increase the invisibility and durability of invisible watermarking by using the multilayer Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in the frequency plane and embedding two marks into an image for the purpose of authentication and copyright when digital content travels through an unsecured channel. A novel watermarking algorithm has been proposed based on five active positions and on using two marks. In addition to the extraction process, watermarking images will be subjected to a set of attack tests. The evaluation criteria have been the bases of assessing the value of SNR, PNSR, MAE and RMSE for both the watermarking images and the watermarking images after attacks, followed by the invisibility of the watermarking being measured before and after the attacks. Our lab results show high robustness and high quality images obtaining value for both SNR and PNSR.

In modern times, the rapid growth of the Internet has made copyright protection of digital contents a critical issue. A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system is aimed at protecting the high-value digital assets and controlling the distribution and utilization of those digital assets. Watermarking technologies are being regarded as a vital mean to proffer copyright protection of digital images. Digital watermarking hides, in digital images, the information necessary for ownership identity to offer copyright protection. This paper proposes an innovative invisible and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection of digital images with the purpose of defending against digital piracy. In the proposed watermarking scheme, a binary watermark image is invisibly embedded into the host image for achieving copyright protection. In watermark embedding, every pixel of the watermark image is embedded into the individual blocks of the host image sized 2×2. In the proposed watermarking scheme, the process of watermark extraction necessitates only the watermarked image and it doesn't require the original image or any of its characteristics, and hence, the proposed watermarking scheme is blind. The efficiency of the proposed watermarking scheme has been demonstrated via the experimental results.

Digital watermarking provides the solution for problems such as copyright and authentication in today’s digital world of communication. Trustworthy watermarking techniques should provide the protection for rightful ownership, robustness and resist against attacks such as filtering and modification. In this paper, we proposed an efficient watermarking scheme based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and quantum Hilbert image scrambling. In the proposed watermarking scheme, first watermark is scrambled using quantum Hilbert image scrambling then perform alpha blending on scrambled watermark and SVD transformed cover image followed by alpha mixing operation. Finally, perform SVD operation of the generated signal; after alpha blending operation, we get watermarked image. The experimental results show strength of the proposed technique in terms of the robustness and security. Performance of the proposed scheme is tested on different image quality parameters of watermarked and host image. These are peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE) and normalized cross-correlation (NCC), average difference (AD), maximum difference (MD), and structural contents (SC).KeywordsSingular value decompositionWatermarkQuantum Hilbert image scramblingSteganography

There are many invisible image watermarking techniques that can be used to provide authenticity and intellectual property rights. This paper presents a comprehensive frame work of invisible image watermarking techniques FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) based on Arnold Transform (AT) scrambling. DWT based on Arnold Transform gives better results in terms of authenticity and robustness as compared to FFT and DCT technique. The performance of each invisible image watermarking technique is theoretically and mathematically analyzed based on parameter PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and MSE (Mean Square Error). Also, the performance of each technique is analyzed on different noise and transformation attack. An experiment based on gray scale image that shows there is consistency between the theoretical analysis and the experimental result analysis. In extraction process, invisible image watermarking technique is applied on both host image and watermarked image.

This paper presents a comparison with the conventional watermarking technique and the novel 5-stage pipelined implementation of DCT/IDCT which is used in digital image watermarking. The most common method of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-based digital image watermarking which is used for image authentication and copyright protection is the transpose method. In this method the 2-Dimensional DCT is obtained by taking two 1-dimensional DCTs in series. The image pixel value is first divided into 8x8 blocks and the row-wise 1D DCT of each block is taken. The transpose of the blocks is then determined and a column-wise 1D DCT is ascertained which gives the 2D DCT of the data. The major advantage of this design is that, unlike the conventional DCT-based watermarking technique, this method uses a 5-stage pipeline which can bring about a speed increase of close to 500% over the conventional method which is naturally a great advantage. This technique has been tested on the standard ‘Lena’ image. Both visible and invisible watermarking is implemented in hardware. The design is done in Verilog HDL and the simulation is done in Modelsim 6.3b. Matlab is used to produce the binary data file which is the input to the 1D DCT module. The hardware implementation is done in Xilinx XC3S4000 FPGA. The results of the comparison are discussed in the concluding sections.

This chapter focuses on the issue of transaction tracking in multimedia distribution applications through digital watermarking terminology. The existing watermarking schemes are summarized and their assumptions as well as the limitations for tracking are analyzed. In particular, an Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based watermarking scheme is proposed, which can overcome the problems of the existing watermarking schemes. Multiple watermarking technique is exploited—one watermark to identify the rightful owner of the work and the other one to identify the legal user of a copy of the work. In the absence of original data, watermark, embedding locations and strengths, the ICA-based watermarking scheme is introduced for efficient watermark extraction with some side information. The robustness of the proposed scheme against some common signal-processing attacks as well as the related future work are also presented. Finally, some challenging issues in multimedia transaction tracking through digital watermarking are discussed.

In recent years, with the rapid development of internet, digital data has been widely used in various science and engineering applications. But, this development has also led to several threats and attacks from the intruders. Most of the organizations are very much concerned about the Illegal copyright activities which have become a series issue. A number of copyright protection schemes have been developed in the literature. Watermarking is one of the best known methods for copyright protection. Earlier Bit Error Rate (BER) is been observed to provide good results for choosing the optimal feature region from the watermarked image. However it fails to produce more accurate image quality measures. This research work mainly focuses on a novel technique implemented based on the simulated attacking approach and the GA-based Multi Dimensional Knapsack Problem (MDKP) solving technique to select the most sufficient feature regions for robust digital image watermarking without affecting the image quality. A major limitation in existing methods is the security problems which lead to decrease in the integrity of digital watermarking scheme. With that problem, the definite optimization problems (variant problems) cannot be resolved using genetic algorithms. To focus on the above mentioned problems, the proposed work uses two approaches. Chaotic Iterative Process encryption scheme is used to solve the security problems for watermarking image. Next, the optimal feature points can be chosen from the watermarked image by Modified version of Peak Signal Noise Ratio (MPSNR). MPSNR is based on the enhanced quality measurement of which point opposes the predefined and undefined attacks. With those two approaches the PSO algorithm is employed as a search strategy for identifying an optimal feature subset. The experimental results illustrates that comparing with various well-known feature-based techniques, the proposed method shows better performance in robust and more secure digital watermarking.

Today, the Internet is a worldwide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. With the rapid evolution of digital networks, digital libraries and World Wide Web (WWW) services, the convenient broadcasting or exposition of digital products on the global network leads easily to illegal copying, modifying and retransmission. The Internet has spawned many copyright issues involving multimedia content distribution. Let’s say an owner would like to sell or distribute a work to legal/registered users only. If the work were subsequently copied/redistributed illegally, how could the owner find who was responsible? Cryptographic techniques provide an effective solution for securing the delivery process and controlling the use of the contents that an user has obtained. However, with flawless transmission through the network, the contents after decryption are exactly the same as the original data. The contents can be copied perfectly infinite times. A user can also manipulate the contents. Digital watermarking (Arnold, Schmucker, & Wolthusen, 2003; Katzenbeisser & Petitcolas, 2000) offers a way to counter copyright piracy on global networks that are not solvable by cryptography. It provides proof and tracking capabilities to illegal copying and distribution of multimedia information. Most existing digital watermarking schemes are based on some assumptions for watermark detection and extraction. Some schemes require the previous knowledge of watermark locations, strengths or some thresholds. In some algorithms, the watermark is estimated with the help of the original watermark information. To ensure the robustness and invisibility of the watermark, the optimum embedding locations are usually different for different images. For a large image database, it could be a disadvantage to require watermark location and strength information for watermark detection and extraction. A large amount of information then needs to be stored. On the Internet, an owner would like to distribute multimedia data by signing different watermarks to different users in order to prevent illegal redistribution of the data by a legal user. In this scenario, watermark detection and extraction algorithms requiring information of either watermark embedding locations and strengths or the original watermark should fail, since one does not know exactly which watermark is embedded in a particular copy of the watermarked image. To this end, we present a new blind watermarking scheme (Yu, Sattar, & Ma, 2002; Yu & Sattar, 2003, 2005) based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) (Hyvarinen, 1999; Hyvärinen & Oja, 1999; Lee, 1998) for color images, which can overcome existing problems of watermark detection and extraction as described above. The new ICA-based scheme is found to be efficient in the application of data tracking/tracing for multimedia distribution through the Internet against other digital watermarking schemes. By adopting this ICA-based watermarking scheme, an efficient multimedia distribution framework/protocol for copyright protection can be accomplished. This article is organized as follows: The watermark embedding and extraction algorithms for color image watermarking using the new ICA-based scheme are presented next, followed by a discussion and comments on the results, security issues, summary and future works.

Today, the Internet is a worldwide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. With the rapid evolution of digital networks, digital libraries and World Wide Web (WWW) services, the convenient broadcasting or exposition of digital products on the global network leads easily to illegal copying, modifying and retransmission. The Internet has spawned many copyright issues involving multimedia content distribution. Let’s say an owner would like to sell or distribute a work to legal/registered users only. If the work were subsequently copied/redistributed illegally, how could the owner find who was responsible? Cryptographic techniques provide an effective solution for securing the delivery process and controlling the use of the contents that an user has obtained. However, with flawless transmission through the network, the contents after decryption are exactly the same as the original data. The contents can be copied perfectly infinite times. A user can also manipulate the contents. Digital watermarking (Arnold, Schmucker, & Wolthusen, 2003; Katzenbeisser & Petitcolas, 2000) offers a way to counter copyright piracy on global networks that are not solvable by cryptography. It provides proof and tracking capabilities to illegal copying and distribution of multimedia information. Most existing digital watermarking schemes are based on some assumptions for watermark detection and extraction. Some schemes require the previous knowledge of watermark locations, strengths or some thresholds. In some algorithms, the watermark is estimated with the help of the original watermark information. To ensure the robustness and invisibility of the watermark, the optimum embedding locations are usually different for different images. For a large image database, it could be a disadvantage to require watermark location and strength information for watermark detection and extraction. A large amount of information then needs to be stored. On the Internet, an owner would like to distribute multimedia data by signing different watermarks to different users in order to prevent illegal redistribution of the data by a legal user. In this scenario, watermark detection and extraction algorithms requiring information of either watermark embedding locations and strengths or the original watermark should fail, since one does not know exactly which watermark is embedded in a particular copy of the watermarked image. To this end, we present a new blind watermarking scheme (Yu, Sattar, & Ma, 2002; Yu & Sattar, 2003, 2005) based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) (Hyvarinen, 1999; Hyvärinen & Oja, 1999; Lee, 1998) for color images, which can overcome existing problems of watermark detection and extraction as described above. The new ICA-based scheme is found to be efficient in the application of data tracking/tracing for multimedia distribution through the Internet against other digital watermarking schemes. By adopting this ICA-based watermarking scheme, an efficient multimedia distribution framework/protocol for copyright protection can be accomplished. This article is organized as follows: The watermark embedding and extraction algorithms for color image watermarking using the new ICA-based scheme are presented next, followed by a discussion and comments on the results, security issues, summary and future works.

A novel watermarking scheme is proposed that could substantially improve current watermarking techniques. This scheme exploits the features of micro images of watermarks to build association rules and embeds the rules into a host image instead of the bit stream of the watermark, which is commonly used in digital watermarking. Next, similar micro images with the same rules are collected or even created from the host image to simulate an extracted watermark. This method, called the features classification forest, can achieve blind extraction and is adaptable to any watermarking scheme using a quantization-based mechanism. Furthermore, a larger size watermark can be accepted without an adverse effect on the imperceptibility of the host image. The experiments demonstrate the successful simulation of watermarks and the application to five different watermarking schemes. One of them is slightly adjusted from a reference to especially resist JPEG compression, and the others show native advantages to resist different image processing attacks.

In this paper, a wavelet based scheme for digital image watermarking is presented. This proposed scheme inserts two watermarks in an image which serves two different purposes. The first one is inserted using blind watermarking technique while second one acts as fragile watermark. As it is blind watermarking technique, there is no need of original image at the time of watermark extraction. The insertion of watermark is based on selection of suitable coefficients which are obtained after applying two-level wavelet decomposition. The result produced by this watermarking scheme is good as compared to conventional watermarking techniques.

Due to the rise in many industrial environment applications involving distributed networked collaborative intelligent measurement systems, intelligent monitoring and multi-sensor information exchange of private information, digital image information security and hidden image authentication, tampering detection, correction, and automatic intelligent self-recovery have become critical concerns. Towards that end, there is a need for more secure, efficient, and robust-to-unauthorized-tampering digital image watermarking, information hiding and authentication schemes. In our prior work, we introduced non-blind watermarking schemes where the carrier and watermark images are available at the receiver's end. We also proposed a double-blind scheme where both the carrier and the watermark images are not available at the receiver's end, but at the expense of possible lower pixel tampering, authentication and automatic intelligent self-correction ability. This paper proposes a blind wavelet-based, high capacity, secure digital watermarking and information hiding scheme with higher tampering localization and authentication that nullifies the need to have the carrier image available at the receiving end. The proposed scheme also increases robustness to image authentication and automatic self-recovery and correction compared to our prior double-blind scheme. The scheme is high capacity and sustains hiding secret hidden and watermarking images of the same full size as an arbitrary-sized carrier image. One of the benefits of the blind watermarking scheme is that it allows usage of varying and arbitrary carrier images that are unknown and unavailable anywhere, including the receiver's end. This is to prevent hackers' recognition of a familiar carrier image and their potential unauthorized tampering. Here, in this paper, two grayscale images are inserted in a colored carrier image. Here the watermark image is used for authentication and tamper localization. The second image is used as ownership or encoded secret hidden message image. The Arnolds Transform is used to introduce added security to a hidden image. The proposed scheme uses an embedded correction matrices mechanism for the extracted hidden information self-recovery from various tampering and digital attacks by unauthorized hackers.

Advances in technologies facilitate the end users to carry out unauthorized manipulation and duplication of multimedia data with less effort. Because of these advancements, the two most commonly encountered problems are (1) copyright protection and (2) unauthorized manipulation of multimedia data. Thus a scheme is required to protect multimedia data from those two above said problems. Digital Watermarking is considered as one of the security mechanisms to protect copyrights of multimedia data. The literature review reveals that the calculation of scaling and embedding parameters are not completely automated. In order to automate the procedure of calculating scaling and embedding parameters the computational intelligence need to be incorporated in the watermarking algorithm. Moreover the quality of the watermarked images could also be preserved by combining computational intelligence concepts. Thus watermarking schemes utilizing computational intelligence concepts could be called as intelligence based watermarking schemes and it is presented in this chapter in detail.

Watermarking technique is a method to protect ownership of digital multimedia. Most existing watermarking techniques achieve a good level of imperceptibility and robustness. The challenges to achieve higher invisibility and resistance with lower computational time motivate researchers to work on new watermarking schemes. Robustness against noise attacks and JPEG2000 compression needs to be improved to acquire a better resistance capability of the watermark. In this paper, we present a block-based Tchebichef watermarking technique for protecting copyrights. In this technique, the host image is first divided into non-overlapping blocks and Tchebichef moments are calculated for each block. The watermarks are embedded into the blocks with lower visual entropies. The watermark image is scrambled by Arnold transform before embedding into the Tchebichef moments of the selected image blocks. The proposed watermarking scheme was tested under noise additions, filtering, cropping and compressing attacks. Our scheme was verified and compared to the existing watermarking techniques under image geometric and processing attacks. Furthermore, the proposed scheme demonstrated a superior performance in robustness under noise attacks and JPEG2000.

Digital watermarking is an application associated with copyright protection. Any digital object can be used as a carrier to carry information. If the information is related to object then it is known as a watermark which can be visible or invisible. In the era of digital information, there are multiple danger zones like copyright and integrity violations, of digital object. In case of any dispute during rights violation, content creator can prove ownership by recovering the watermark. Two most important prerequisites for an efficient watermarking scheme are robustness and security. Watermark must be robust and recoverable even if a part of content is altered by one or more attacks like compression, filtering, geometric distortions, resizing, etc. In this work, we propose a blind watermarking scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). Singular values (SV’s) of high frequency (HH) band are used to optimize perceptual transparency and robustness constraints. Although most of the SVD-based schemes prove to be robust, little attention has been paid to their security aspect. Therefore, we introduce a signature-based authentication mechanism at the decoder to improve security. Resulting blind watermarking scheme is secure and robust.