Visible Watermarking Research Articles

An effective steganographic technique for hiding the image data using the LSB technique

Steganography is the art and science of writing secret messages so that neither the sender nor the intended recipient knows there is a hidden message. Data hiding is the art of hiding data for various reasons, such as keeping private data, secure, confidential data, etc. With increasing data exchange over a computer network, information security has become a significant issue. There are many methods used for data hiding, and steganography is a well-known technique. Steganography is the art of invisible contact and science. Steganography is the process through which the presence of a message can be kept secret. The objective of this paper is to hide data using the LSB (Least Significant Bit) technique into images that can be detected only by the specified user. We have developed a user-friendly GUI such that it can be used with the utmost ease. This paper is motivated to hide the message stated by the user in the dialog box given within the picture. The secret text is converted to the ciphertext to make it more stable. The sender selects the cover image, and it is used to generate the secured Stegno image, which is identical to the cover image. With the support of a private or public communication network, on the other hand, the stegno image can be saved and sent to the designated user, i.e., the recipient downloads the stegno image and can retrieve the secret text concealed in the stegno image using that same application. As for the watermarking, we have visible and invisible we have used the same LSB technique. In visible watermarking, text or image is embedded in the cover image, which can be noticed easily. As for invisible watermarking, some specific text is inserted into an image, and while retrieving it, it generates a QR code, which can be scanned to get the watermarked text. We used the three different types of cover images i.e. Gray, and RGB also estimated the performance metrics. SNR, MSE, and PSNR the three performance metrics are used, and found that PSNR achieved good results i.e.,71.4733. The RGB image with the hidden text is achieved up to 77.6697

An Overview of TheProposed Technique for Removing Visible Watermark

Watermarks are commonly used to protect the ownership and copyright of digital media. However, there are legitimate scenarios where watermark removal is necessary. Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the development of sophisticated techniques for both detecting and removing watermarks.this research provides a summary of methods for detecting and removing Regenerative AdversarialNetworks (GANs) are one noteworthy method. It is possible to train GANs to recognize watermark patterns and produce unwatermarked versions of watermarked content. One such method, which uses GANs to find and remove watermarks in deep neural networks (DNNs), has been demonstrated to be successful even when it comes to DNN watermarks that are based on backdoors.Another method makes use of deep neural networks' U-structure, which is highly effective in translating images. A comprehensive model like the AdvancedUnet has been developed to concurrently extract and remove visual watermarks. This model uses a deep-supervised hybrid loss to direct the network in learning the transformation between the watermarked input and the clean ground truth. It also integrates efficient modules to extend the architecture's depth without appreciably increasing computingcosts.

Removing Interference and Recovering Content Imaginatively for Visible Watermark Removal

Visible watermarks, while instrumental in protecting image copyrights, frequently distort the underlying content, complicating tasks like scene interpretation and image editing. Visible watermark removal aims to eliminate the interference of watermarks and restore the background content. However, existing methods often implement watermark component removal and background restoration tasks within a singular branch, leading to residual watermarks in the predictions and ignoring cases where watermarks heavily obscure the background. To address these limitations, this study introduces the Removing Interference and Recovering Content Imaginatively (RIRCI) framework. RIRCI embodies a two-stage approach: the initial phase centers on discerning and segregating the watermark component, while the subsequent phase focuses on background content restoration. To achieve meticulous background restoration, our proposed model employs a dual-path network capable of fully exploring the intrinsic background information beneath semi-transparent watermarks and peripheral contextual information from unaffected regions. Moreover, a Global and Local Context Interaction module is built upon multi-layer perceptrons and bidirectional feature transformation for comprehensive representation modeling in the background restoration phase. The efficacy of our approach is empirically validated across two large-scale datasets, and our findings reveal a marked enhancement over existing watermark removal techniques.

Adversarial watermark: A robust and reliable watermark against removal

Digital image watermarking used to be an important tool for copyright protection. However, as neural network-based watermark removal methods have been proposed in recent years, the embedded watermark is increasingly easy to be erased, which poses a great threat to copyright protection. To address this issue, we propose an adversarial visible watermark scheme, which combines the visible watermark with the adversarial perturbation. By attacking the watermark removal network, we maximize the resistance of visible watermark against removal while minimizing the visual distortion. To further improve the robustness against various transformations (e.g. cropping, JPEG compression), we employ the region of interest and random pre-processing to embed the adversarial visible watermark. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively resist the removal of watermarks on different datasets and network structures while having good transferability and robustness, which enables the watermark to continue to be an effective copyright protection method.

Visible watermarking for 3D models based on 3D Boolean operation

With the continuous expansion of the application field of 3D models and the convenience of model storage, transmission, and replication, the problems of illegal reproduction, illegal modification, and embezzlement faced by 3D models are gradually becoming severe, which has brought substantial economic losses to the producers of 3D models. Therefore, this study aims to develop a visible watermarking method for 3D model using 3D Boolean operation. First, based on TrueType font library, the 3D model of the watermark is generated through the extraction, positioning and combination of character outline. Next, the spatial registration between the watermark model and the 3D model was carried out according to the embedding position of the watermark. Finally, based on multiple 3D Boolean operations, the copyright information of the 3D watermark model is embedded into the 3D model in various modes, such as embossing, debossing, and surface mesh embedding. The experiments demonstrate that the method of this paper supports embedding watermark information in B-rep, CSG, and voxel models. This method can readily support business applications for visible watermarking of 3D models and has laid a good foundation for researching multipurpose 3D model watermarking algorithms supporting copyright notification and protection.

ProActive DeepFake Detection using GAN-based Visible Watermarking

With the advances in generative adversarial networks (GAN), facial manipulations called DeepFakes have caused major security risks and raised severe societal concerns. However, the popular DeepFake passive detection is an ex-post forensics countermeasure and fails in blocking the disinformation spread in advance. Alternatively, precautions such as adding perturbations to the real data for unnatural distorted DeepFake output easily spotted by the human eyes are introduced as proactive defenses. Recent studies suggest that these existing proactive defenses can be easily bypassed by employing simple image transformation and reconstruction techniques when applied to the perturbed real data and the distorted output, respectively. The aim of this paper is to propose a novel proactive DeepFake detection technique using GAN-based visible watermarking. To this front, we propose a reconstructive regularization added to the GAN’s loss function that embeds a unique watermark to the assigned location of the generated fake image. Thorough experiments on multiple datasets confirm the viability of the proposed approach as a proactive defense mechanism against DeepFakes from the perspective of detection by human eyes. Thus, our proposed watermark-based GANs prevent the abuse of the pretrained GANs and smartphone apps, available via online repositories, for DeepFake creation for malicious purposes. Further, the watermarked DeepFakes can also be detected by the SOTA DeepFake detectors. This is critical for applications where automatic DeepFake detectors are used for mass audits due to the huge cost associated with human observers examining a large amount of data manually.

DENet: Disentangled Embedding Network for Visible Watermark Removal

Adding visible watermark into image is a common copyright protection method of medias. Meanwhile, public research on watermark removal can be utilized as an adversarial technology to help the further development of watermarking. Existing watermark removal methods mainly adopt multi-task learning networks, which locate the watermark and restore the background simultaneously. However, these approaches view the task as an image-to-image reconstruction problem, where they only impose supervision after the final output, making the high-level semantic features shared between different tasks. To this end, inspired by the two-stage coarse-refinement network, we propose a novel contrastive learning mechanism to disentangle the high-level embedding semantic information of the images and watermarks, driving the respective network branch more oriented. Specifically, the proposed mechanism is leveraged for watermark image decomposition, which aims to decouple the clean image and watermark hints in the high-level embedding space. This can guarantee the learning representation of the restored image enjoy more task-specific cues. In addition, we introduce a self-attention-based enhancement module, which promotes the network's ability to capture semantic information among different regions, leading to further improvement on the contrastive learning mechanism. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on different challenging benchmarks. Experimental evaluations show that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance and yield high-quality images. The code is available at: https://github.com/lianchengmingjue/DENet.

Adaptive Reversible Visible Watermarking Based on Total Variation for BTC-Compressed Images

Few previous Reversible Visible Watermarking (RVW) schemes have both good transparency and watermark visibility. An adaptive RVW scheme that integrates Total Variation and visual perception in Block Truncation Coding (BTC) compressed domain, called TVB-RVW is proposed in this paper. A new mean image estimation method for BTC-compressed images is first developed with the help of Total Variation. Then, a visual perception factor computation model is devised by fusing texture and luminance characteristics. An adaptive watermark embedding strategy is used to embed the visible watermark with the effect of the visual perception factor in the BTC domain. Moreover, a lossless embedding method of the encrypted visible watermark is exploited to deter illegal watermark removal. The visible watermark can be removed since the visual perception factor and the estimated mean image remain unchanged before and after watermark embedding. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over previous RVW schemes in BTC in terms of the visual quality of watermarked images and watermark visibility, and it can achieve a good balance between transparency and watermark visibility.

Robust Image Watermarking Using LWT and Stochastic Gradient Firefly Algorithm

Watermarking of digital images is required in diversified applications ranging from medical imaging to commercial images used over the web. Usually, the copyright information is embossed over the image in the form of a logo at the corner or diagonal text in the background. However, this form of visible watermarking is not suitable for a large class of applications. In all such cases, a hidden watermark is embedded inside the original image as proof of ownership. A large number of techniques and algorithms are proposed by researchers for invisible watermarking. In this paper, we focus on issues that are critical for security aspects in the most common domains like digital photography copyrighting, online image stores, etc. The requirements of this class of application include robustness (resistance to attack), blindness (direct extraction without original image), high embedding capacity, high Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and high Structural Similarity Matrix (SSIM). Most of these requirements are conflicting, which means that an attempt to maximize one requirement harms the other. In this paper, a blind type of image watermarking scheme is proposed using Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT) as the baseline. Using this technique, custom binary watermarks in the form of a binary string can be embedded. Hu’s Invariant moments’ coefficients are used as a key to extract the watermark. A Stochastic variant of the Firefly algorithm (FA) is used for the optimization of the technique. Under a prespecified size of embedding data, high PSNR and SSIM are obtained using the Stochastic Gradient variant of the Firefly technique. The simulation is done using Matrix Laboratory (MATLAB) tool and it is shown that the proposed technique outperforms the benchmark techniques of watermarking considering PSNR and SSIM as quality metrics.

A hierarchical protection scheme for intellectual property of semi-open source datasets based on double watermarking

The high quality datasets are an important guarantee for the rapid development of deep learning, so the protection of datasets should be taken seriously. The semi-open source datasets are the datasets that are free for some users and used for academic communication and are charged for another part of users and generates commercial value. However, most of the existing datasets protection mechanisms are only a single passive copyright verification mechanism, which cannot protect semi-open source datasets well. Based on this situation, this paper proposes a hierarchical protection scheme for the intellectual property of semi-open source datasets based on double watermarking. The scheme adopts different protection schemes for datasets for the above mentioned user groups: internal users and purchased users, to achieve the purpose of hierarchical protection. The passive verification and active protection functions for semi-open source datasets are realized by embedding blind watermark and visual watermark, respectively. Finally, the paper conducts experiments on a number of underlying datasets to verify the imperceptibility, universality, harmlessness and effectiveness of the scheme.

Adversarial Data Hiding in Digital Images.

In recent studies of generative adversarial networks (GAN), researchers have attempted to combine adversarial perturbation with data hiding in order to protect the privacy and authenticity of the host image simultaneously. However, most of the studied approaches can only achieve adversarial perturbation through a visible watermark; the quality of the host image is low, and the concealment of data hiding cannot be achieved. In this work, we propose a true data hiding method with adversarial effect for generating high-quality covers. Based on GAN, the data hiding area is selected precisely by limiting the modification strength in order to preserve the fidelity of the image. We devise a genetic algorithm that can explore decision boundaries in an artificially constrained search space to improve the attack effect as well as construct aggressive covert adversarial samples by detecting “sensitive pixels” in ordinary samples to place discontinuous perturbations. The results reveal that the stego-image has good visual quality and attack effect. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use covert data hiding to generate adversarial samples based on GAN.

Generic Reversible Visible Watermarking via Regularized Graph Fourier Transform Coding.

Reversible visible watermarking (RVW) is an active copyright protection mechanism. It not only transparently superimposes copyright patterns on specific positions of digital images or video frames to declare the copyright ownership information, but also completely erases the visible watermark image and thus enables restoring the original host image without any distortion. However, existing RVW algorithms mostly construct the reversible mapping mechanism for a specific visible watermarking scheme, which is not versatile. Hence, we propose a generic RVW framework to accommodate various visible watermarking schemes. In particular, we obtain a reconstruction data packet-the compressed difference image between the watermarked image and the original host image, which is embedded into the watermarked image via any conventional reversible data hiding method to facilitate the blind recovery of the host image. The key is to achieve compact compression of the difference image for efficient embedding of the reconstruction data packet. To this end, we propose regularized Graph Fourier Transform (GFT) coding, where the difference image is smoothed via the graph Laplacian regularizer for more efficient compression and then encoded by multi-resolution GFTs in an approximately optimal manner. Experimental results show that the proposed framework has much better versatility than state-of-the-art methods. Due to the small amount of auxiliary information to be embedded, the visual quality of the watermarked image is also higher.

Imperceptible–visible watermarking for copyright protection of digital videos based on temporal codes

Digital watermarking has emerged as an important tool for copyright protection of digital videos. In this paper, we introduce a robust and imperceptible video watermarking method performed in the base-band domain that is not computationally expensive. Two nonoverlapped watermarks are embedded in the host video frames. The first watermark is a grayscale image that represents the ownership of the video. First, this watermark is decomposed into a sequence of binary images called temporal codes by using a spatiotemporal masking model. Then, the temporal codes are embedded in the spatial domain of video frames by using the imperceptible–visible watermarking paradigm. Since it is well known that such a paradigm is computationally expensive, we employ a technique that considers the video scene as the basic processing unit to considerably increase the execution speed. The second watermark works as a supporting media to share data between embedding and exhibition stages and is embedded in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) with a very robust method based on quantization index modulation (QIM) under dither modulation and some spatiotemporal criteria of the human visual system (HVS). Computer simulations were conducted regarding robustness, imperceptibility, and time consumption to determine the feasibility of our proposal. Experimental results confirm that the combination of temporal codes and the imperceptible–visible watermarking paradigm is an innovation in the field that brings advantages such as simplicity, low computational complexity, and improved robustness and imperceptibility.

WATERMARK TECHNIQUE FOR AUTHENTICATION OF VISIBLY WATERMARK IMAGES

With the rapid spread of computer networks and the wide use of multimedia technologies, many watermarking techniques are now under development and investigation for protecting owner's intellectual rights. Watermarks can be divided into two types, visible and invisible watermarks, physical visible watermarks have been used for centuries. Now days it is used in digital library, in video broad casting, and other multimedia services. The visible watermark may face several problems. Among these problems, watermark removal and unauthorized insertion are two main concern. This paper proposes a method of invisible watermark to overcome these problems. The watermarking process based on hiding a selected watermark object, that holds a little a mount of information relative to the source object, inside the cover image which has to be authenticated. The processes are based on using invisible watermarks to protect visibly watermarked images which are done by using different techniques. The experiments have shown that the proposed algorithm can provide a very effective protection for watermarked images.

Imperceptible–Visible Watermarking to Information Security Tasks in Color Imaging

Digital image watermarking algorithms have been designed for intellectual property, copyright protection, medical data management, and other related fields; furthermore, in real-world applications such as official documents, banknotes, etc., they are used to deliver additional information about the documents’ authenticity. In this context, the imperceptible–visible watermarking (IVW) algorithm has been designed as a digital reproduction of the real-world watermarks. This paper presents a new improved IVW algorithm for copyright protection that can deliver additional information to the image content. The proposed algorithm is divided into two stages: in the embedding stage, a human visual system-based strategy is used to embed an owner logotype or a 2D quick response (QR) code as a watermark into a color image, maintaining a high watermark imperceptibility and low image-quality degradation. In the exhibition, a new histogram binarization function approach is introduced to exhibit any watermark with enough quality to be recognized or decoded by any application, which is focused on reading QR codes. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can embed one or more watermark patterns, maintaining the high imperceptibility and visual quality of the embedded and the exhibited watermark. The performance evaluation shows that the method overcomes several drawbacks reported in previous algorithms, including geometric and image processing attacks such as JPEG and JPEG2000.

Additional Information Delivery to Image Content via Improved Unseen–Visible Watermarking

In a practical watermark scenario, watermarks are used to provide auxiliary information; in this way, an analogous digital approach called unseen–visible watermark has been introduced to deliver auxiliary information. In this algorithm, the embedding stage takes advantage of the visible and invisible watermarking to embed an owner logotype or barcodes as watermarks; in the exhibition stage, the equipped functions of the display devices are used to reveal the watermark to the naked eyes, eliminating any watermark exhibition algorithm. In this paper, a watermark complement strategy for unseen–visible watermarking is proposed to improve the embedding stage, reducing the histogram distortion and the visual degradation of the watermarked image. The presented algorithm exhibits the following contributions: first, the algorithm can be applied to any class of images with large smooth regions of low or high intensity; second, a watermark complement strategy is introduced to reduce the visual degradation and histogram distortion of the watermarked image; and third, an embedding error measurement is proposed. Evaluation results show that the proposed strategy has high performance in comparison with other algorithms, providing a high visual quality of the exhibited watermark and preserving its robustness in terms of readability and imperceptibility against geometric and processing attacks.

Design a Hybrid FPGA Architecture for Visible Digital Image Watermarking in Spatial and Frequency Domain

Hybrid field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation is proposed to improve the performance of visible image watermarking systems. The visible watermarking process is implemented as pixel by pixel operation under a spatial domain or vector operation in the frequency domain. The proposed approach is mainly designed for watermarking the images taken from digital cameras of various sizes. The padding technique is used for unequal sizes of the watermark image and original host image. The architecture data path consists of eight and six stages of pipeline capable of watermarking on the pixel-based operation and vector-based operation, respectively. The dual image watermarking architecture data path consists of a 13-stage pipeline. Pipeline and parallelism mechanisms are used to improve throughput. To improve the performance in discrete cosine transform operations at the frequency domain, the shift-add technique replaces the conventional multipliers. The clock gating technique is employed to reduce the power by preventing unnecessary switching in a path. Hardware implementation of the algorithm is tested in Intel Cyclone FPGA with the device of EP4CGX22CF19C6, with which the throughput achieved is 1.27[Formula: see text]Gbits/s with a total area utilization of 35[Formula: see text]digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, 378 look-up tables (LUTs) and 486 registers.

Split then Refine: Stacked Attention-guided ResUNets for Blind Single Image Visible Watermark Removal

Digital watermark is a commonly used technique to protect the copyright of medias. Simultaneously, to increase the robustness of watermark, attacking technique, such as watermark removal, also gets the attention from the community. Previous watermark removal methods require to gain the watermark location from users or train a multi-task network to recover the background indiscriminately. However, when jointly learning, the network performs better on watermark detection than recovering the texture. Inspired by this observation and to erase the visible watermarks blindly, we propose a novel two-stage framework with a stacked attention-guided ResUNets to simulate the process of detection, removal and refinement. In the first stage, we design a multi-task network called SplitNet. It learns the basis features for three sub-tasks altogether while the task-specific features separately use multiple channel attentions. Then, with the predicted mask and coarser restored image, we design RefineNet to smooth the watermarked region with a mask-guided spatial attention. Besides network structure, the proposed algorithm also combines multiple perceptual losses for better quality both visually and numerically. We extensively evaluate our algorithm over four different datasets under various settings and the experiments show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Seam Carving based visible watermarking robust to removal attacks

Visible watermarking offers direct copyright protection to the naked eye using visible pattern superimposed in the host image. However, due to their exposure, the watermark pattern becomes an easy target to remove by malicious entities that generates copyright-free images. Until now, in the scientific literature several semi-automatic visible watermark removal attacks have been proposed, showing enough visual quality of the recovered host image. In this paper, we propose a watermark design based on modified Seam Carving technique to provide robustness against removal attacks including inpainting-based attacks, Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based attacks, and image matting-based attacks. Robustness against the attacks is measured using common image quality assessments and a watermark visibility assessment based on the Human Visual System (HVS). Experimental results show robustness of the proposed method against above mentioned watermark removal attacks under the most severe situation, in which adversary has the logotype used as a watermark pattern because it is public in Internet. The proposed method can be applied to any visible watermarking algorithms to make them robust against illegal removal attempts, without sacrificing their original functionality, such as reversibility for authorized users.

An Adaptive Visible Watermark Embedding Method based on Region Selection

Aiming at the problem that the robustness, visibility, and transparency of the existing visible watermarking technologies are difficult to achieve a balance, this paper proposes an adaptive embedding method for visible watermarking. Firstly, the salient region of the host image is detected based on superpixel detection. Secondly, the flat region with relatively low complexity is selected as the embedding region in the nonsalient region of the host image. Then, the watermarking strength is adaptively calculated by considering the gray distribution and image texture complexity of the embedding region. Finally, the visible watermark image is adaptively embedded into the host image with slight adjustment by just noticeable difference (JND) coefficient. The experimental results show that our proposed method improves the robustness of visible watermarking technology and greatly reduces the risk of malicious removal of visible watermark image. Meanwhile, a good balance between the visibility and transparency of the visible watermark image is achieved, which has the advantages of high security and ideal visual effect.