Existing Watermarking Techniques Research Articles

A Survey: Digital Image Watermarking-Robustness and Imperceptibility

With the Internet expanding, multimedia security has become a significant problem. As digital image manipulation is getting simpler, the certification of authenticity has become more difficult. Digital watermarking outperforms conventional security methods for protecting photos from attacks. The need for reliable image authentication methods in the contemporary digital era has always been a hot topic among academics and researchers. When transmitting sensitive information today through a regular correspondence route, many hacks are possible. Everyone, therefore, requires their digital data to be non-tampered. Many solutions are available like stenography, cryptography, and watermarking. Watermarking gives promising results when it comes to the authenticity of the images. The robustness and imperceptibility of several existing watermarking techniques are demonstrated in this study and critical analysis is performed. Additionally, the author provides a thorough introduction to key ideas like the transform domain and the spatial domain. This study also offers a thorough analysis of contemporary methods for watermarking digital images while showcasing established practices in various domains. Hence, this research study could potentially serve as a viable resource for researchers seeking to develop effective watermarking techniques for practical applications.

Relational data watermarking resilience to brute force attacks in untrusted environments

Watermarking techniques for relational data that aim at robustness face the challenge of guaranteeing watermark persistence despite aggressive attacks. Nevertheless, attackers cannot compromise watermark detection to their will since they must ensure the usability of the stolen data. Attacks that constitute a potential master-key for false ownership claims focus on leaking or compromising values used for watermark synchronization. For instance, brute-force attacks attempt to guess the values of parameters used for watermark embedding. The chances for brute-force attacks of successfully performing illegal watermark detection increases in untrusted environments where the leaks of parameters are common. In this paper, (i) we show how brute-force attacks succeed even if not all watermark detection parameters’ values are correctly guessed, (ii) we define the role played by each parameter in robustness, and (iii) we formalize a method for improving the resilience of existing watermarking techniques in scenarios lacking trust. According to the experimental results, watermarking approaches to which our proposal has been applied benefit in terms of robustness and security requirements, extending the deployment opportunities for other techniques.

Protecting Intellectual Property of Language Generation APIs with Lexical Watermark

Nowadays, due to the breakthrough in natural language generation (NLG), including machine translation, document summarization, image captioning, etc NLG models have been encapsulated in cloud APIs to serve over half a billion people worldwide and process over one hundred billion word generations per day. Thus, NLG APIs have already become essential profitable services in many commercial companies. Due to the substantial financial and intellectual investments, service providers adopt a pay-as-you-use policy to promote sustainable market growth. However, recent works have shown that cloud platforms suffer from financial losses imposed by model extraction attacks, which aim to imitate the functionality and utility of the victim services, thus violating the intellectual property (IP) of cloud APIs. This work targets at protecting IP of NLG APIs by identifying the attackers who have utilized watermarked responses from the victim NLG APIs. However, most existing watermarking techniques are not directly amenable for IP protection of NLG APIs. To bridge this gap, we first present a novel watermarking method for text generation APIs by conducting lexical modification to the original outputs. Compared with the competitive baselines, our watermark approach achieves better identifiable performance in terms of p-value, with fewer semantic losses. In addition, our watermarks are more understandable and intuitive to humans than the baselines. Finally, the empirical studies show our approach is also applicable to queries from different domains, and is effective on the attacker trained on a mixture of the corpus which includes less than 10% watermarked samples.

Vowel and non-vowel frame segmentation based digital speech watermarking technique using LPA method

With the increased use of the Internet in everyday life, data transmission over the internet needs to be secure, so it necessitates the adoption of watermarking. Watermarking is the best solution for securing digital content and ensuring the integrity of the original data. It also certifies digital content and provides the best form of concealing information for permission. In many circumstances, the information is problematic as the use of digital content evolves rapidly. In this paper, we have proposed a novel speech watermarking method based on vowel and non-vowel frame segmentation using the Linear predictive analysis (LPA) method. The different vowel frame segments have been used in the LPA method to estimate the predicted values. The proposed model has used the LPA method, which allows for a more adaptive and skilful demonstration of a novel digital speech watermarking method. Afterwards, the specific locations have been chosen to embed the minimum value obtained from the grayscale watermark image. For the evaluation purpose, we have considered objective and subjective measures. The average SNR, MOS, and BER values of the proposed method are 45.68 dB, 4.55, and 0, respectively. The imperceptibility of watermarked speech and extracted watermark signals using the proposed method have approximately 48 dB, and 59 dB, respectively. The results show that the proposed speech watermarking procedure is more secure, powerful, and subtle than existing watermarking techniques because it reduces time and memory significantly.

Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Recovering Watermark Synchronization.

In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network-based template architecture that compensates for the disadvantages of existing watermarking techniques that are vulnerable to geometric distortion. The proposed template consists of a template generation network, a template extraction network, and a template matching network. The template generation network generates a template in the form of noise and the template is inserted into certain pre-defined spatial locations of the image. The extraction network detects spatial locations where the template is inserted in the image. Finally, the template matching network estimates the parameters of the geometric distortion by comparing the shape of spatial locations where the template was inserted with the locations where the template was detected. It is possible to recover an image in its original geometrical form using the estimated parameters, and as a result, watermarks applied using existing watermarking techniques that are vulnerable to geometric distortion can be decoded normally.

Audio Watermarking Art of Hiding Copyright Information for Piracy Control

Background & Objective: Revolution in digital multimedia is a boon to music industries, music creators for decades as digital music can be created, stored replicated and transferred easily and efficiently. But digitalization of multimedia becomes a curse when the multimedia content is illegally and freely distributed, shared across the network online or offline. Countering the illegal copying and distribution of digital media is the driving force behind the evolution of copyright protection and digital watermarking techniques. Methods: This paper presents the problem of piracy and the overview of the evolution of different digital audio watermarking techniques in time, transformed and compression domains to counter the problem of music piracy. The limitations of the audio watermarking techniques and the future scope for improvement are also presented. Results & Conclusion: This paper summarizes the evolution of audio watermarking techniques and reviews the existing watermarking techniques applied on audios. The limitations of the audio watermarking techniques and the future scope for improvement are also proposed. Additionally, the preliminaries for audio and brief of the properties which are exploited for watermarking of audio are presented.

Reversible Data Hiding on Image Encryption with Index Boundary for Partial Confidential Documents

An efficient data hiding method is proposed in the smart cyber-attacks such as data theft, virus attacks on the transmitting of whole confidential data, partial confidential data via private and government networks. The transmitting data over the internet is one of the better solutions to make a work easy and fast even though protecting data from the smart hackers is vital role in the cyber-crimes. There are various protection techniques of confidential data like digital watermarking, digital signals with embedding data into images, audio and videos. The existing watermarking techniques using RSA is a time consuming process for number of iterations to be performed even in signal decryption of image. These complexities of iterations to be overcome by the Least Significant Bits, DWT transformation and Arnold transformation were failing in all aspects of security requirements. The proposed method of reversible data hiding has an efficient encryption in medical images, health care image and data transmitting in various organizations.

Quantum and dual-tree complex wavelet transform-based image watermarking

Nowadays, multimedia applications are extensively utilized and communicated over Internet. Due to the use of public networks for communication, the multimedia data are prone to various security attacks. In the past few decades, image watermarking has been extensively utilized to handle this issue. Its main objective is to embed a watermark into a host multimedia data without affecting its presentation. However, the existing methods are not so effective against multiplicative attacks. Therefore, in this paper, a novel quantum-based image watermarking technique is proposed. It initially computes the dual-tree complex wavelet transform coefficients of an input cover image. The watermark image is then scrambled using Arnold transform. Thereafter, in the lower coefficient input the watermark image is embedded using quantum-based singular value decomposition (SVD). Finally, the covered image is obtained by applying the inverse dual-tree complex wavelet transform on the obtained coefficients. Comparative analyses are carried out by considering the proposed and the existing watermarking techniques. It has been found that the proposed technique outperforms existing watermarking techniques in terms of various performance metrics.

Hybrid domain watermarking technique for copyright protection of images using speech watermarks

When digital images are shared over an open access network such as the internet, facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media, then the security of these images are required. The digital watermarking is one approach for the security of images (e.g. copyright protection, ownership authentication). In most of the watermarking approaches, secret information such as owner binary logos and texts are used for protection of images. These days, biometric watermarks such as human speech signals are preferred for protection of images. In this paper, a watermarking technique based on various signal processing transforms is proposed and implemented for the security of image using human speech signal. In this technique, the first discrete cosine transform (DCT) and then singular value decomposition (SVD) are applied on the watermark speech signal to get its hybrid coefficients which are inserted into hybrid coefficients of the cover image to get a watermarked image. These hybrid coefficients of cover image are first generated using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and then fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCuT) is applied on it. The performance of techniques is tested for standard speech database such as TIMIT in terms of imperceptibility, robustness and payload capacity. The experimental results and comparison show that the proposed watermarking technique performs better than the existing watermarking techniques available in the literature. This technique may also be used for security of speech signal against spoof attack.

Dual hybrid medical watermarking using walsh-slantlet transform

A hybrid robust lossless data hiding algorithm is proposed in this paper by using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Fast Walsh Transform (FWT) and Slantlet Transform (SLT) for image authentication. These transforms possess good energy compaction with distinct filtering, which leads to higher embedding capacity from 1.8 bit per pixel (bpp) up to 7.5bpp. In the proposed algorithm, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is applied for region of interest (ROI) detection and two different watermarks are created. Embedding is done after applying FWH by changing the SVD coefficients and by changing the highest coefficients of SLT subbands. In dual hybrid embedding first watermark is the ROI and another watermark consists of three parts, i.e., patients’ personal details, unique biometric ID and the key for encryption. Comparison of the proposed algorithm is done with the existing watermarking techniques for analyzing the performance. Experiments are simulated on the proposed algorithm by casting numerous attacks for testing the visibility, robustness, security, authenticity, integrity and reversibility. The resultant outcome proves that the watermarked image has an improved imperceptibility with a high level of payload, low time complexity and high Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) against the existing approaches.

An Imperceptible Medical Image Watermarking Framework for Automated Diagnosis of Retinal Pathologies in an eHealth Arrangement

The newly driven concept of electronic health (eHealth) has made distance irrelevant in healthcare. eHealth, which is commonly known as an electronic form of healthcare, refers broadly to the use of advanced information and communication technology within healthcare environments. However, its practical implementation poses many sets of challenges. One of the major challenges is authentication and integrity verification of vital medical data. Proper verification of patients with associated medical images or data is crucial to conduct accurate medical diagnostics. This paper presents an imperceptible watermarking-based security framework to address the issues of authentication and integrity verification of medical images for eHealth applications. The electronic patient record (EPR), as a watermark image, is embedded in optical coherence tomography (OCT)/fundus scan (consisting of healthy and diseased scans), using a hybrid watermarking technique based on fast curvelet transform (FCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The proposed work showed a high level of robustness, imperceptibility, and security for medical images when compared with the state-of-the-art existing watermarking techniques. In addition, we conducted a comparative analysis of the watermarked OCT/fundus scans with non-watermarked scans, and our results validate that the insertion of the watermark in the retinal images does not affect the automated medical image diagnosis of various retinal pathologies. Moreover, the correct recovery of the EPR from the watermarked scans makes the proposed framework applicable to the authentication of medical images for a computer-based automated diagnostic system in an eHealth arrangement.

An Improved Watermarking Technique for Copyright Protection Based on Tchebichef Moments

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.

Simple and robust watermarking scheme based on square-root-modulus technique

In this paper, we present a simple and robust watermarking scheme for color images. The scheme is based on the square-root-modulus technique employed in the integer wavelet domain, which allows a large number of data bits to be embedded in a host image. Simulations confirmed that marked images generated by the proposed scheme are tolerant to various attacks such as blurring, brightness, contrast, cropping, edge sharpening, inversion, JPEG/JPEG2000 compressions, noise-additions, and truncation. Additionally, the payload of the proposed method is significantly larger than that of existing watermarking techniques and the resulting perceived quality is not bad. Because the code is quite simple, it is suitable for the proposed method implemented in the mobile equipments or smart devices.

3D anaglyph image watermarking approach

In this paper, a binary watermark is embedded and extracted using principal component analysis along with non-subsampled contourlet transform. Before the use of aforementioned techniques, the binary watermark is scrambled, for which we have used Arnold transform. This will by default add a level of security measures without a password. The approach as presented in the following paper is very efficient, novel, robust and blind. We have also considered the possibility of image processing attacks, hence we have employed non subsampled contourlet transform for the same. The scheme is tested on various images and we have come to a conclusion that this scheme is very performance oriented when compared to the existing watermarking techniques using 3D anaglyphic images.

A Study of Digital Image Watermarking for JPEG and PNG Images using Discrete Wavelet Transform

Objectives: To emphasis on digital image watermarking techniques and its applications using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Methods: We propose two watermarking algorithms for embedding and extraction process and use two images as cover image and watermark image of same format as input image. We have considered two image formats JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and PNG (Portable Network Graphics) of different resolutions for analyzing the performance of the proposed algorithm. Findings: The proposed research work is compared with the existing works on the basis of compression percentage, MSE (Mean Square Error), PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and Normalized Correlation (NC) values and the result has been carried out using DWT in Matlab 7.12. All the existing watermarking techniques referred in this paper have some limitations at somewhere. The PSNR values of all the existing research works is not more than 50 dB for the entire traditional image processing images. But in this proposed research work, the PSNR value is more than 66 dB for all the twenty test images we have taken. Higher the PSNR value means the quality of the watermark image is better. If the PSNR value is good then the MSE value will automatically be good because one is inversely proportional to other. Improvements: In the previous research works, common values of PSNR were between 30 dB to 50 dB. If the PSNR value of the watermark image is more than 50 dB then it will be tough to detect the difference between the cover image and the watermark image by the common Human Visibility System (HVS). The NC value 1 means that the correlation between the extracted watermark image and the original watermark image is almost similar in a particular point.

Publicly Verifiable Watermarking for Intellectual Property Protection in FPGA Design

Watermarking as a novel intellectual property (IP) protection technique can protect field-programmable gate array IPs from infringement. However, existing watermarking techniques may give away sensitive information during the public verification, which enables malicious verifiers or third parties to remove the embedded watermark and resell the design. Current zero-knowledge watermarking verification schemes can address the sensitive information leakage issue but are vulnerable to embedding attacks, which makes them ineffective in preventing the infringement denying of untrusted buyers (verifiers). This paper proposes a new publicly verifiable watermarking detection technique based on chaos-based zero-knowledge interaction and time stamping to resiliently resist the sensitive information leakage and embedding attacks, and is thus robust to the cheating from the prover, verifier, or third party. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed method has better robustness than the most recent related literature.

Implementation Of Encryption And Watermarking Algorithm For Remote Sensing Image

This paper presents the processing of remote sensing image using water marking and encryption algorithm. Earth observation missions have recently attracted rowing interest form the scientific and industrial communities, mainly due to the large number of possible applications capable to exploit remotely sensed data and images. Along with the increase of market potential, the need arises for the protection of the image products from non-authorized use. Such a need is a very crucial one even because the Internet and other public/private networks have become preferred means of data exchange. A crucial issue arising when dealing with digital image distribution is copyright protection. Such a problem has been largely addressed by resorting to watermarking technology. A question that obviously arises is whether the requirements imposed by remote sensing imagery are compatible with existing watermarking techniques. On the basis of these motivations, the contribution of this work is twofold: i) assessment of the requirements imposed by the characteristics of remotely sensed images on watermark-based copyright protection ii) analysis of the state-of-the-art, and performance evaluation of existing algorithms in terms of the requirements at the previous point. so in this method we are going to propose the Double-Density Wavelet Transform for remote

Ultra-Low Overhead Dynamic Watermarking on Scan Design for Hard IP Protection

Unlike conventional legal means, digital watermark enables an effective self-protection mechanism for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) designers to protect their intellectual property (IP). However, existing watermarking techniques come with unpredictable and often high design and performance overhead, which makes them impractical. In this paper, we propose an ultra-low overhead watermarking scheme to protect hard IPs, the dominating form of commercial IPs. Our approach is based on the observation that an optimized scan design uses two complementary connections between two adjacent scan cells. Such scan design flexibility in the selection of local connection styles provides a vehicle to embed watermarking constraints. It can conveniently be implemented by local rewiring and/or introducing dummy scan cells. The test vectors will be changed accordingly to reflect the watermarked connection styles in order to guarantee the test coverage. This approach offers two unique features: 1) ultra-low overhead and 2) easy detectability. First, because the scan chain order is maintained and these changes are local, the proposed watermarking technique will introduce ultra-low overhead in terms of area, power, and speed. Next, watermark can be extracted from the test vectors and/or the corresponding scan output. Experimental results validate that the performance overhead is negligible (almost zero on the most cases) and the watermark is resilient to various possible attacks.

Non Oblivious Watermarking Technique for JPEG2000 Compressed Images Using Arnold Scrambling of Unequal Size Watermark Blocks

In this paper, a watermarking technique for JPEG 2000 compressed image is proposed. Scrambling of secret message is performed block-wise using Arnold Transform. Secret message is divided into non-overlapping blocks of unequal size and then Arnold transform is applied on each block and secret key is generated based on the periodicity of each block. Scrambled secret message is embedded into qualified significant wavelet coefficients of a cover image. After embedding the secret message into wavelet coefficients, the remaining processes of JPEG 2000 standard are executed to compress the watermarked image at different compression rates. Scaling Factor ( SF ) is used to embed watermark into wavelet coefficients and the value of SF is stored into COM box of the code stream of JPEG 2000 compressed image and this SF value and secret key are used to extract the embedded watermark on the receiver side. The performance of the proposed technique is robust to a variety of attacks like image cropping, salt and pepper noise, and rotation. Proposed technique is compared with the existing watermarking techniques for JPEG 2000 compressed images to show its effectiveness.

Proxy signatures and buyer–seller watermarking protocols for the protection of multimedia content

Watermarking techniques are developed to deal with multimedia distribution, authentication and copyright protection. It is usually the seller who embeds a watermark in multimedia content to identify the buyer. The embedded watermark can then be used to trace the traitors identity if unauthorized copies are found. However, repudiation and framing issues might arise in this approach. To solve these problems, buyer---seller watermarking protocols have been proposed based on watermarking in the encrypted domain. Such watermarks combine encryption, digital watermarking, and fingerprinting to preserve digital rights of both the buyer and the seller. Unfortunately, most existing watermarking techniques do not provide convincing proofs to ensure that they achieve the claimed level of security and informal proofs abound in the literature. In this paper, we propose a buyer---seller watermarking protocol based on proxy signatures and homomorphic encryption. Formal proofs are provided to show that in the proposed protocol, watermarks are generated such that the seller is unable to fabricate piracy, but he can trace copyright violators. The protocol further protects anonymity of the buyer until he is adjudicated to be guilty. Moreover, we solve the conspiracy problem without imposing any unrealistic assumptions about thrust-worthiness of the parties involved.