Towards robust and secure watermarking

Abstract

This paper presents yet another attempt towards robust and secure watermarking. Some recent works have looked at this issue first designing new watermarking schemes with a security oriented point of view, and then evaluating their robustness compared to state-of-the-art but unsecure techniques. Our approach is, on contrary, to start from a very robust watermarking technique and to propose changes in order to strengthen its security levels. These changes include the introduction of a security criterion, an embedding process implemented as a maximization of a robustness metric under the perceptual and the security constraints, and a watermarking detection seen as a contrario decision test.Our experimentations lead to, once again, a trade-off between security and robustness. The technique is now perfectly secure against attacks mounted during the second edition of the BOWS challenge, but the price to pay is either a lower robustness against common image processing, either a bigger probability of false alarm.