Binary Watermark Image Research Articles

Adaptive bistable stochastic resonance based blind watermark extraction in discrete cosine transform domain

AbstractBlind watermark extraction in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain has a wide application prospect as well as a challenging subject. The imperceptibility of watermark signal makes watermark extraction a weak signal reception issue in essence. For DCT coefficients of host image generally disobey Gaussian distribution, at which the performance of linear correlated reception is no longer optimal. Aiming at this, a novel blind watermark extraction scheme combining the uncorrelated reception with adaptive bistable stochastic resonance (ABSR) technique is proposed. First, by block DCT transformation for host image, an additive watermark embedding algorithm is introduced, in which the watermarked image can be converted to one dimensional time domain weak signal (binary watermark image) reception under additive Laplacian noise (selected DCT coefficients). On this basis, through the key technology research on quantitatively cooperative resonance relationship under Laplacian noise, the ABSR system can be implemented by bistable system parameters self‐adaptive adjustment, in which the ABSR system output signal will be enhanced rather than be weakened by random noise. Finally, the ABSR‐based watermark extraction scheme is investigated, and both the visual effect, bit error ratio performance and robustness of proposed scheme are testified to be superior to that of traditional uncorrelated extraction.

A color channel multiplexing approach for robust discrete wavelet transform based image watermarking

SummaryCopyright protection of digital images has become a consequential issue in recent years. To prevent a breach of copyright for a color image, this article presents a novel discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based robust image watermarking method with a color channel multiplexing approach. In this proposed method, the original color image is separated into red, green, and blue color channels. One of these color channels is copied and a set of four channels is obtained. Then these channels are combined to obtain a new gray‐level cover image. 2‐level DWT is performed on the cover image. Arnold scrambled binary watermark image i embedded into the low‐frequency sub‐band of the cover image. 2‐level inverse DWT is performed to produce a gray‐level watermarked image. Then a demultiplexing process is performed by separating the gray‐level watermarked image into four color channels. The average values of the two copied color channels are calculated and then converted into a single‐color channel. Finally, the watermarked color image is get by merging three different color channels. To approve the performance of the presented method, various experimental tests have been performed and a benchmarking analysis has been conducted. The results show that the proposed method is robust against non‐linear and linear attacks while protecting watermarking imperceptibility.

Robustness of Modified Non-Separable HaarWavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition for Non-blind Digital Image Watermarking

Security is a matter of significant concern for image media. An effective way to protect images is by digital watermarking. This paper introduces a non-blind digital watermarking scheme using modified non-separable Haar wavelet transform (NSHWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), Arnold's cat map, and Rabin-p cryptosystem to embed a binary watermark image into a color cover image. Aside from robustness, security is also prioritized in the scheme. High robustness is achieved using two transform domain techniques, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and SVD, while security is heightened with the double encryption by Arnold's cat map scrambling and Rabin-p cryptosystem. A disadvantage of the discrete wavelet transform in digital image watermarking is the calculation complexity and the high cost of changing memory and time. The proposed algorithm uses a modified NSHWT instead of the traditional method of DWT. Therefore, the load of the process on the hardware can significantly be reduced while still maintaining the advantages of DWT. The algorithm is objectively evaluated in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and embedding capacity for both binary and color watermarks, as well as efficiency. It has been concluded that the proposed scheme performs competently compared with other recent watermarking techniques based on DWT and SVD.

Image Authentication Using Block Truncation Coding in Lifting Wavelet Domain

Image watermarking is one of the most accepted solutions protecting image authenticity. The method presented in this paper not only provides the desired outcome also efficient in terms of memory requirements and preserving image characteristics. This scheme effectively utilizes the concepts of block truncation coding (BTC) and lifting wavelet transform (LWT). The BTC method is applied to observe the binary watermark image corresponding to its gray-scale image. Whereas, the LWT is incorporated to transform the cover image from spatial coordinates to corresponding transform coordinates. In this, a quantization-based approach for watermark bit embedding is applied. And, the extraction of binary watermark data from the attacked watermarked image is based on adaptive thresholding. To show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, the experiment over different benchmark images is performed. The experimental results and the comparison with state-of-the-art schemes depict not only the good imperceptibility but also high robustness against various attacks.

Development and Implementation of a Video Watermarking Method Based on DCT Transform

This paper presents a new color video watermarking technique based on the one-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). This approach uses a differential embedding technique to insert the bits of the watermark into the video frames so that the extraction process is blind and straightforward. To further ensure the security of the method, the binary image watermark is scrambled using Arnold transform before embedded into the video segment. Also, a color space transformation from Red, Green and Blue (RGB) to YUV is performed in order to deal with the color nature of the video segments. The proposed approach exhibits good robustness against a wide range of attacks such as video compression, cropping, Gaussian filtering, and noise adding. Finally, we propose an implementation of the video watermarking technique using the Raspberry Pi 3 platform. Nearly the same remarks may be made as in the simulation resultsconcerning the robustness against video compression attacks

Synchronisation correction‐based colour image watermarking using proximal classifier with consistency and multivariate generalised Gaussian model

In this Letter, a novel synchronisation correction-based colour image watermarking approach is proposed to resist geometric distortions. The Cb channel of the YCbCr colour host image is first decomposed by a two-level contourlet transform, and binary watermark image is embedded into the host image by modifying the lowpass coefficients. Then the multivariate generalised Gaussian distribution is used to capture the significant features of colour images, and the proximal classifier with consistency is employed to estimate geometric distortion parameters. Finally, the watermark image is extracted from the corrected watermarked image. Simulation results demonstrate that the presented approach shows excellent robustness against various common image processing attacks and geometric attacks while guaranteeing invisibility.

A DISCRETE COSINE TRANSFORM BASED WATERMARKING SCHEME FOR COLOR IMAGE USING YCbCr SPACE

In this paper, a non-blind color image watermarking scheme is proposed based on discrete cosine transform and YCbCr color space. The host image is converted from RGB space into YCbCr space and the Y component image is employed for embedding a binary watermark image. The strength of the watermark is controlled by a robustness factor to obtain an acceptable trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in term of Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and normalized correlation (NC). The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust under various attacks like JPEG compression, filtering and noise addition.

FPGA Implementation of Lifting-Based Data Hiding Scheme for Efficient Quality Access Control of Images

In this paper, a hardware implementation of a data hiding technique is proposed for efficient quality access control of images using lifting-based discrete wavelet transformation (DWT). Host image is decomposed into n-level wavelet tiles. A binary watermark image is transmuted and embedded into high–high DWT coefficients using adaptive dither modulation technique without self-noise suppression. The embedding of external information into the host image will degrade the visual quality. This feature may be utilized for access control. At the decoder side, an authorized user can enjoy superior quality image by extracting watermark bits using minimum distance decoding. Field-programmable gate array-based hardware architecture is proposed for real-time implementation of the scheme. The experiment is done over a large number of benchmark images, and the results are found to be superior to the related work which is present in the literature. It is also seen that (a) in real-time processing, the scheme saves 89.53% power than the related implementation found in the literature, and (b) a very high throughput of 23.8 MB/s is achieved for watermarking encoder and decoder, respectively, at a maximum operating frequency of 130.14 MHz for the processing of (512 × 512) sized images.

A Novel Robust Audio Watermarking Algorithm by Modifying the Average Amplitude in Transform Domain

In order to improve the robustness and imperceptibility in practical application, a novel audio watermarking algorithm with strong robustness is proposed by exploring the multi-resolution characteristic of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the energy compaction capability of discrete cosine transform (DCT). The human auditory system is insensitive to the minor changes in the frequency components of the audio signal, so the watermarks can be embedded by slightly modifying the frequency components of the audio signal. The audio fragments segmented from the cover audio signal are decomposed by DWT to obtain several groups of wavelet coefficients with different frequency bands, and then the fourth level detail coefficient is selected to be divided into the former packet and the latter packet, which are executed for DCT to get two sets of transform domain coefficients (TDC) respectively. Finally, the average amplitudes of the two sets of TDC are modified to embed the binary image watermark according to the special embedding rule. The watermark extraction is blind without the carrier audio signal. Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm has good imperceptibility, large payload capacity and strong robustness when resisting against various attacks such as MP3 compression, low-pass filtering, re-sampling, re-quantization, amplitude scaling, echo addition and noise corruption.

Robust color image watermarking using invariant quaternion Legendre-Fourier moments

In this paper, a geometrically invariant color image watermarking method using Quaternion Legendre-Fourier moments (QLFMs) is presented. A highly accurate, fast and numerically stable method is proposed to compute the QLFMs in polar coordinates. The proposed watermarking method consists of three main steps. First, the Arnold scrambling algorithm is applied to a binary watermark image. Second, the QLFMs of the original host color image are computed. Third, the binary digital watermark is embedding by performing the quantization of selected QLFMs. Two different groups of attacks are considered. The first group includes geometric attacks such as rotation, scaling and translation while the second group includes the common signal processing attacks such as image compression and noise. Experiments are performed where the performance of proposed method is compared with the existing moment-based watermarking methods. The proposed method is superior over all existing quaternion moment-based watermarking in terms of visual imperceptibility capability and robustness to different attacks.

Using dynamic pixel value mapping method to construct visible and reversible image watermarking scheme

A reversible and visible image watermarking scheme extracts a visibly embedded binary watermark image and recovers the original cover image. This paper presents a reversible and visible image watermarking scheme that embeds visible watermarks into a part of the cover image, called the embedded region R, and embeds required binary strings into the whole image through the conventional difference-expansion method. The size of the embedded visible watermark is determined by the coefficient k; a large k value leads to a large embedded region for the visible watermark. The embedded region R is first segmented to non-overlapped k×k blocks, and each block is related to one bit of the watermark image. For those blocks that are related to the logo bits of the watermark image, these k×k blocks are adjusted by the proposed dynamic pixel value mapping method for highly visual detection. The binary bit string S, composed of the binary watermark image and LSB bits of the logo watermark bits’ corresponding k×k blocks, is embedded into the cover image using the conventional difference-expansion method. Experimental results show that the watermark is clearly embedded into the embedded region R and that the distortion of the reversible embedding is limited.

FUZZY BASED INVISIBLE WATERMARKING

Due to the rapid increase in computer and network technology, the need for securing digital information becomes an important target for technology producers; specially researchers. In this work HVS attributes – luminance sensitivity, contrast sensitivity and edge sensitivity are modeled using Fuzzy system to embed a binary watermark image in gray-scale host images. The performance of the presented system is measured with two metrics such as PSNR and SSIM. Four types of attacks are subjected on the watermarked/signed images to test the robustness of the proposed scheme. The presented system focuses on optimizing the trade-off between the imperceptibility and robustness. .

融合量子密钥真随机性的二值图像水印

融合量子密钥真随机性的二值图像水印

Improving Scanned Binary Image Watermarking Based On Additive Model and Sampling

The SBWBAMS (Scanned Binary Image Watermarking Based on Additive Model and Sampling) algorithm proposed by Hou et al. owns strong robustness to the process of printing and scanning process. However, because the embedding strength used in the algorithm is set artificially, watermark information may not be correctly embedded into binary image when the embedding strength is low. Firstly, the minimum embedding strength to embed watermark correctly is analyzed in this paper, and then an improved binary image watermarking algorithm based on adaptive embedding strength is proposed. The proposed algorithm adjusts embedding strength adaptively according to image content, ensuring that the embedded watermark information is correct. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only embed and extract the watermark information correctly, but also still own strong robustness to the process of printing and scanning process.

Multiresolution Video Watermarking Algorithm Exploiting the Block-Based Motion Estimation

This paper presents a novel technique for embedding a digital watermark into video frames based on motion vectors and discrete wavelet transform (DWT). In the proposed scheme, the binary image watermark is divided into blocks and each watermark block is embedded several times in each selected video frame at different locations. The block-based motion estimation algorithm is used to select the video frame blocks having the greatest motion vectors magnitude. The DWT is applied to the selected frame blocks, and then, the watermark block is hidden into these blocks by modifying the coefficients of the Horizontal sub-bands (HL). Adding the watermark at different locations in the same video frame makes the scheme more robust against different types of attacks. The method was tested on different types of videos. The average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and the normalized correlation (NC) are used to measure the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm does not affect the visual quality of video frames and the scheme is robust against a variety of attacks.

Non Correlation DWT Based Watermarking Behavior in Different Color Spaces

There are two digital watermarking techniques. Digital watermarking techniques based on correlation and digital watermarking techniques that are not based on correlation. In previous work, we proposed a DWT2 based CDMA image watermarking scheme to study the effects of using eight color spaces RGB, YCbCr, JPEG-YCbCr, YIQ, YUV, HSI, HSV and CIELab, on watermarking algorithms based on correlation techniques. This paper proposes a non correlation based image watermarking scheme in wavelet transform domain and tests it in the same color spaces, to develop studying, reach a comprehensive analysis and focus on satisfying the requirements of based non coloration watermarking algorithms. To achieve more security, imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed scheme, first, the binary watermark image encodes by applying ATM, CCM and exclusive OR. Then, the scrambled watermark embeds into intended quantized approximation coefficients of wavelet transform by LSB insertion technique.

Embedding Binary Image Watermark in DC Components of All Phase Discrete Cosine Biorthogonal Transform

Watermarking technique provides the possibility for copyright protection. Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is the most popular tool used in watermarking algorithm. But the watermarking algorithm based on DCT is not the most ideal choice in terms of the complexity and robustness. All phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) owns the characteristics of high frequency attenuation and good applications in image coding, image denoising and other fields of digital image processing, which provides an efficient method for watermarking. In this paper, a new watermarking algorithm based on APDCBT is proposed. Besides, the binary image watermark is scrambled by Arnold transform to enhance its privacy and robustness greatly in our algorithm. The watermark information is embedded in direct-current (DC) components considering DC components have much larger perceptual capacity. Compared with the DCT algorithm, the proposed algorithm has stronger robustness in embedding and extracting the watermark. Experimental results show that our algorithm can satisfy the imperceptibility and robustness very well. Furthermore, our algorithm is tested against four kinds of attacks: JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt & pepper noise and rotation.

Reversible Binary Image Watermarking Method Using Overlapping Pattern Substitution

This paper presents an overlapping pattern substitution (PS) method. The original overlapping PS method as a reversible data hiding scheme works well with only four pattern pairs among fifteen possible such pairs. This paper generalizes the original PS method so that it will work well with an optimal pair from among the fifteen possible pattern pairs. To implement such an overlapping PS method, changeable and embeddable patterns are first defined. A class map is virtually constructed to identify the changeable and embeddable pairs. The run-lengths between consecutive least probable patterns are recorded. Experiments show that an implementation of our overlapping PS method works well with any possible type of pairs. Comparison results show that the proposed method achieves more embedding capacity, a higher PSNR value, and less human visual distortion for a given embedding payload.

Robust watermarking algorithm for digital images using discrete wavelet and probabilistic neural network

Digital watermarking, which has been proven effective for protecting digital data, has recently gained considerable research interest. This study aims to develop an enhanced technique for producing watermarked images with high invisibility. During extraction, watermarks can be successfully extracted without the need for the original image. We have developed discrete wavelet transform with a Haar filter to embed a binary watermark image in selected coefficient blocks. A probabilistic neural network is used to extract the watermark image. To evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm and the quality of the extracted watermark images, we used widely known image quality function measurements, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and normalized cross correlation (NCC). Results indicate the excellent invisibility of the extracted watermark image (PSNR=68.27dB), as well as exceptional watermark extraction (NCC=0.9779). Experimental results reveal that the proposed watermarking algorithm yields watermarked images with superior imperceptibility and robustness to common attacks, such as JPEG compression, rotation, Gaussian noise, cropping, and median filter.

Color image watermarking based on quaternion Fourier transform and improved uniform log-polar mapping

In this paper, we propose a blind color image watermarking scheme based on quaternion discrete Fourier transform (QDFT) and on an improved uniform log-polar mapping (IULPM). The proposed watermarking scheme embeds dual watermarks: one is a meaningful binary image watermark and the other is a bipolar watermark. The former is embedded in the real part of mid-frequency QDFT coefficients using quantization index modulation. The latter is used to resynchronize the watermark after the watermarked image has been attacked, making the scheme resistant to geometric attacks. In particular, the IULPM allows for greater accuracy when estimating the rotation angle of a geometric attack. At the same time, the watermark embedding employs the image holistically, rather than in a block pattern. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better performance of robustness against both common signal operations and geometric attacks compared to other existing schemes.