Spatial Domain Watermarking Research Articles

Application of Multimedia Watermarking Technology in the Field of Information Security

This paper aims at comprehensively discussing the principle, methods, applications, challenges and future development of multimedia watermarking technology. In order to achieve this goal, this paper first introduces the basic concept and classification of multimedia watermarking technology, and then expounds in detail the core principles of spatial domain, frequency domain and mixed domain watermarking technology and the methods of watermark embedding and extraction. In terms of methods, this paper reveals their technical differences in robustness, invisibility and capacity through in-depth analysis of the characteristics of watermarking technology in different domains. In terms of application, the article shows the extensive application of multimedia watermarking technology in copyright protection, content authentication, covert communication and multimedia data integrity and authenticity verification through specific case analysis, highlighting its important value in the field of information security. Generally speaking, this paper systematically analyzes the principle, method and application of multimedia watermarking technology, which provides an important theoretical basis and practical guidance for further research and development in this field.

An Overview of Robust Video Watermarking Techniques

Copyright hacking and piracy have increased as the Internet has grown in popularity and access to multimedia material has increased. Security, property protection, and authentication have all been achieved via watermarking techniques. This paper presents a summary of some recent efforts on video watermarking techniques, with an emphasis on studies from 2018 to 2022, as well as the various approaches, achievements, and attacks utilized as testing measures against these watermarking systems. According to the findings of this study, frequency-domain watermarking techniques are more popular and reliable than spatial domain watermarking approaches. Hybrid DCT and DWT are the two most used techniques and achieve good results in the field of video watermarking, and the system is more robust against attacks. PSNR was taken into consideration as a comparison metric in various recent articles in terms of robustness in the video watermarking field.

Robust Image Watermarking in Spatial Domain Utilizing Features Equivalent to SVD Transform

In recent years, digital image watermarking has gained a significant amount of popularity and developed into a crucial and essential tool for copyright protection, security, and the identification of multimedia content. Despite its high computational complexity, singular value decomposition (SVD) is an extensively utilized transformation in digital image watermarking. This research presents a robust and blind image watermarking scheme that directly alters the image pixels in the spatial domain to incorporate the watermark by quantizing the block-wise invariant maximum singular value. Using a distribution rule, pixels from the cover image are redistributed to obtain a new image that is divided into square and non-overlapping blocks to obtain invariant maximum singular values by using the matrix 2-norm in the spatial domain without performing an SVD transform. This modifies the pixels of the cover image such that the outcome is equivalent to the difference between the maximum singular values of the corresponding blocks in covers and watermarked images. The strengths of the proposed approach are highlighted by a comparison of experimental results with the most recent and comparable watermarking approaches.

Robust, Secure and Semi-Blind Watermarking Technique Using Flexible Scaling Factor in Block-Based Wavelet Algorithm

Multimedia security has received much attention recently because of the rapid transmission of elements such as text, images, audio, video, software, animation and games. Security is becoming especially critical for content owners concerned about the illegal usage of their original products. Encryption and watermarking are two methodologies for digital applications. Spatial domain and frequency domain watermarking algorithms give very promising results in embedding binary images into the cover images. This paper proposed a new method of semi-blind watermarking technique. The digital images are divided into 4 × 4 blocks and converted into discrete Wavelet transformations (DWTs). The binary image is embedded into each block using the flexible scaling factor method. Experimental results show that the proposed method has higher peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and similarity ratio (SR) values compared to the standard Wavelet transformation and block-based Wavelet algorithms. The results prove that the proposed hybrid algorithm is more effective, robust, secure and resistant than DWT and block-based DWT algorithms.

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.

An efficient watermarking algorithm for medical images

Medical images exchanged over vulnerable networks are sensitive to modifications or tampering which could lead to misdiagnosis, risking the lives of the patients. Therefore, to provide safe and secure transmission of medical images, key security requirements such as authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality must be addressed. In this paper, a novel and efficient algorithm is proposed which provides security services for transmitted medical images in tele-medicine applications. The proposed algorithm employs joint encryption/watermarking procedures to provide the required security services, as well as to provide control access privileges at the receiving side. The algorithm is based on reversible data hiding principles that guarantee the extraction of the hidden data while restoring the original image unaffected. The embedded data is basically two watermarks; a spatial domain watermark and an encrypted domain watermark. The dual watermarks allow the authenticity and integrity of the transmitted medical images to be verified in the spatial and encrypted domains. The proposed algorithm has been extensively evaluated using three performance metrics; embedding capacity, visual image quality, and entropy. The ability of the algorithm to fulfill the security, reversibility, and separability requirements has been validated.

Fast and robust image watermarking method in the spatial domain

To solve the copyright protection problem of a colour image, a new blind colour image watermarking method combining a discrete cosine transform (DCT) in the spatial domain is presented in this study. The advantages of the spatial-domain watermarking algorithm and frequency-domain one are made full use in this scheme. Based on the different quantisation steps in red, green, and blue three-layer images, the processes of watermark embedding and blind extraction are completed in the spatial domain without a real DCT domain. The scheme is realised by using the unique features of the direct current (DC) coefficient and the relativity of DC coefficients between adjacent pixel blocks. This scheme can effectively solve the problems of the large-capacity colour image watermarking algorithm, such as long-running time and weak robustness. Comparing with other advanced watermarking algorithms, the presented scheme has better invisibility, stronger robustness, and higher real-time performance.

A combined domain watermarking algorithm of color image

At present, some watermarking techniques have been proposed to protect the copyright of image either in frequency domain or in spatial domain. Designing a combined-domain watermarking algorithm is a difficult problem, which not only has short running time of spatial-domain watermarking algorithm but also has strong robustness of transform-domain watermarking algorithm. In this paper, a novel color image watermarking algorithm in spatial domain combining the principle of discrete Wavelet transform (DWT) is presented to embed color watermark image into color carrier image. At first, how to get the first low-frequency coefficient of DWT in spatial domain is analyzed. Then, the changing quantity of the first low-frequency coefficient in spatial domain is calculated by the presented algorithm. According to the presented features of the first low-frequency coefficient, the processes of embedding watermark and extracting watermark information are finished in spatial-domain instead of DWT. This presented algorithm has the following two innovations: (i) the first low-frequency coefficient of DWT is computed by image pixels in spatial domain; (ii) the presented algorithm is as robust as the transform-domain watermarking methods, and it is as rapid as the spatial-domain watermarking methods. The simulation data shows the presented algorithm has good watermarking performances as respect to visual imperceptibility, robustness, payload, and running time.

A blind image watermarking scheme combining spatial domain and frequency domain

In order to realize the copyright protection of color image effectively, combining the advantages of spatial-domain watermarking scheme and frequency-domain one, a blind color image watermarking scheme with high performance in the spatial domain is proposed in the paper. The presented scheme does not require real discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete Hartley transform (DHT), but only uses the different quantization steps to complete the embedding and blind extracting of color watermark in the spatial domain according to the unique characteristic of direct current (DC) components of DCT and DHT. The contributions of this paper include the following: (1) This scheme combined the strengths of watermarking scheme in the spatial domain and frequency domain, which has fast speed and strong robustness; (2) the scheme makes full use of the energy aggregation characteristics of image block, and the invisibility of the watermarking scheme has greatly improved; and (3) different quantization steps are chosen to embed and extract watermark in different layers, which reduce the modification range of pixel value effectively. The experimental results show that compared with the existing schemes, the proposed watermarking scheme has higher performance, such as better invisibility, stronger robustness and shorter execution time.

Medical image watermarking for ownership & tamper detection

Image watermarking can provide ownership identification as well as tamper protection. Transform domain based image watermarking has been proven to be more robust than the spatial domain watermarking against different signal processing attacks. On the other hand, tamper detection is found to be working well in spatial domain. In the proposed work, the focus is on the improvement of the medical image watermarking by incorporating the concept of multiple watermarking of the host image. The principal components (PC) based insertion make the scheme secured towards ownership attack. On the other hand, LZW (Lempel–Ziv–Welch) based fragile watermarking is used to hide compressed image’s ROI (region of interest) to tackle the intentional tampering attacks. The ROI based watermark generation provides the complete reversibility of the ROI. In this way, proposed scheme provides perfect reversibility of ROI, good imperceptibility in addition to satisfactory robustness. The tamper handing ability of proposed scheme is also tested against various attacks, which turns out to be quite good. The proposed scheme is found to be more useful, when compared with recently proposed schemes in term of features and usefulness.

Crypto-watermarking of images for secure transmission over cloud

With ever increasing usage of Cloud based data storage in various domains, the security and authentication of such data is a matter of concern for the end user. Data centres being the third party servers are always prone to data leakage. Moreover investigating an illegal activity over cloud is not possible. The proposed scheme provides a solution to the highly confidential medical data(image) of patients to be shared with authentic users (hospital staff) over the cloud. This work proposes a collective blind crypto-watermarking scheme that provides not only security but also authentication and ownership protection to the medical information of the patients. The scheme is based on a bit level extraction and embedding of watermark in spatial domain. A chaotic mapping based substitution initially obfuscates the host image then a watermark image is embedded into the host image. At next stage the watermarked image is encrypted in fractional Hartley transform domain. This crypto-watermarked image is shared over vulnerable cloud storage. The chaotic parameters and the transform orders serve as the secret keys. The results and analysis indicate that proposed scheme is secure against potential attacks and provides a solution to the security risks associated with the cloud based data storage services.

JND-Guided Perceptually Color Image Watermarking in Spatial Domain

Watermarking is an effective solution for copyright protection and forensics tracking via hiding information into the image signal. Recently, spatial-embedding watermarking methods from different transform domain have been proposed rapidly and effectively protect the copyright of the color image. Compared to the individual frequency domain method, it has both advantages of spatial domain and frequency domain. Here, we proposed a novel spatial-embedding watermarking method based on an attended just noticeable difference (JND) model with color complexity, to achieve a good tradeoff between robustness and perceptual quality. In particular, at the spatial embedding level, the direct current (DC) coefficients are selected for embedding and the perceptual JND model is used to guide the amount of pixel modification to improve visual quality. Different from the previous JND model, we proposed an attended JND model that considers color complexity, which is more consistent of the human visual perception model. Compared with the other JND models, the proposed JND model is more suitable for the watermarking framework. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme has better performance than other existing watermarking schemes. This greatly benefits the practical implementations of the spatial-embedding watermarking methods.

Mathematical Formula of Performance of Watermarking System with Repetition of Bits of Watermark

The performance of a watermarking system depends on all of its factors, such as watermark embedding strength, size of watermark and repetition of watermark bits. In this paper, a mathematical formula is designed, that governs the relation of performance of watermarking system with amount of the repetition of watermark bits. Performance of the watermarking system is measured by using the extracted watermark bit accuracy rate. The designed formula is verified experimentally. A spatial domain watermarking scheme is used for experimental verification. Further, verification is done for different kind of attacks such as cropping, Gaussian filter, Gaussian noise and salt & pepper noise. Accuracy rate by using the mathematical formula and experimental observations are very near. This supports that the designed mathematical formula is reliable.

Dual watermarking framework for privacy protection and content authentication of multimedia

In the current multimedia networked infrastructure, privacy breaches due to cyber-attacks result in huge economic losses. Despite these threats there is ever increasing demand to share data over various insecure networks for accomplishment of numerous tasks. In such a scenario there is a greater need to develop new algorithms for strengthening the existing cybersecurity frameworks, ensure security, privacy, copyright protection and authentication of data. In this paper a new technique for copyright protection, data security and content authentication of multimedia images is presented. The copyright protection of the media is taken care of by embedding a robust watermark using an efficient inter-block coefficient differencing algorithm and is proposed as Scheme I. Scheme II has been utilized to ensure both copyright protection, and content authentication. The authentication of the content has been ensured by embedding a fragile watermark in spatial domain while as copyright protection has been taken care of utilizing a robust watermark. In order to thwart an adversary and ensure that it has no access to actual embedded data, we make use of a novel encryption algorithm in conjunction with Arnold transform to encrypt data prior to its embedding. The experimental results reveal that the proposed framework offers high degree of robustness against single/dual/triple attacks; with Normalized Correlation (NCC), more than or equal to 0.95. Besides, the fragile watermark embedding makes the system capable of tamper detection and localization with average BER more than 45% for all signal processing/geometric attacks. The average PSNR achieved for both schemes is greater than 41 dB. A comparison of the proposed framework with various state-of-the-art techniques demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority.

High Performance and Energy Efficient Image Watermarking for Video Using a Mobile Device

This article describes the basic information hiding technique that is most commonly used nowadays. As evolution in the communication media has made information access much easier but has also increased the risks of invading privacy and ownership. To overcome such threats, watermarking is one of the most suitable methods used for hiding information. It is the process of inserting audio, video, image or text for owner verification. A study on spatial and temporal domain watermarking is conducted. An experiment is carried out for the analysis of power and time consumption while inserting and extraction of the watermarks. For better understanding of the concept, embedding of an image on a video was performed using a computer and a mobile with similar logic. This concluded that the watermarking process can be implemented by both computer and mobile phones. Extraction of image was done with PSNR value that was inserted on a video. Only limitation found in this process was tracing back to the source of content theft and that is covered by forensic watermarking.

Security Authentication of Dual Chaotic Image Watermarking in Spatial Domain with Spatial and Frequency Domain Characteristics Analysis

This article presents an advanced dual chaotic watermarking scheme to improve information security. To ensure confidentiality in digital image transmission, a secure dual watermarking scheme is proposed by applying the chaotic logistic system and hyper-chaotic dynamical system. Chaotic watermarking was conducted in the spatial domain, where suboptimal secure hashing with a variable length was selected in preprocessing stages. The secret key was generated by the chaotic sequence for pixel shuffling using a chaotic logistic map, so that a controlled amount of distortion was inserted into the host digital image. Watermarking was proceeded after the chaotic watermark had been embedded into the shuffled image. To strengthen the security, the hyper-chaotic system was used to generate chaotic blocks for block scrambling in order to achieve dual chaotic watermarking. Characteristics analysis was conducted for multiple examples in both spatial and frequency domains. Potential effects induced by the chaotic driving parameter on processing time and integrity authentication of chaotic dual watermarking were also analyzed in detail.

An ASIC based invisible watermarking of grayscale images using pixel value search algorithm (PVSA)

Digital image watermarking has become more popular due to its applications in copyright protection and secret communication. Most of the image watermarking algorithms reported till date involve modification of the host contents for embedding a secret data, leading to a reduced robustness and a limited embedding capacity. In the present work, a novel spatial domain watermarking scheme called Pixel Value Search Algorithm (PVSA) is proposed using a linear search operation to achieve high robustness and a theoretically unlimited embedding capacity. In the proposed scheme, secret data are embedded into a host image by mapping their intensity values into row and column locations. Due to this linear mapping of secret data, the host structural content is not altered. In addition, multiple watermarks can be mapped into a single host image using the PVSA technique. The proposed algorithm is verified using MATLAB® simulations and its performance characteristics are assessed using a standard benchmark tool called strimark. Experimental results illustrate the robustness of the PVSA technique against the attacks of Gaussian blurring, Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise, Poisson noise, speckle noise, mean and median filtering, histogram equalization, image sharpening, intensity transformation, unsharp filtering, JPEG attack, etc. Subsequently an ASIC implementation of the PVSA algorithm is carried out using Verilog HDL and various modules of the Cadence® EDA tool so as to integrate the chip as a watermark co-processor. The ASIC implementation using a 0.18 μm technology at an operating frequency of 100 MHz consumes a power of 326.34 μW for the complete hardware architecture.

Smart security and securing data through watermarking

The growth of image processing in embedded system has provided the boon of enhancing the security in various sectors. This lead to the developing of various protective strategies, which will be needed by private or public sectors for cyber security purposes. So, we have developed a method which uses digital water marking and locking mechanism for the protection of any closed premises. This paper describes a contemporary system based on user name, user id, password and encryption technique which can be placed in banks, protected offices to beef the security up. The burglary can be abated substantially by using a proactive safety structure. In this proposed framework, we are using water-marking in spatial domain to encode and decode the image and PIR(Passive Infrared Sensor) sensor to detect the existence of person in any close area.

A Robust Image Watermarking Scheme Based on SVD in the Spatial Domain

With the development of image processing technology, the copyright protection of digital images has become an urgent problem to be solved. As an effective method, the robust digital watermarking technique emerges at a historic moment. Currently, most robust watermarking schemes are performed in the transform domains, such as the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). Compared with spatial domain watermarking schemes, these methods have achieved good performance, such as better robustness and higher security. However, the computational complexity increases with the use of forward and reverse transforms. In this paper, we analyze the SVD-based watermarking scheme and its impact on the spatial domain. Based on this analysis and the mathematical characteristics of SVD, we present a robust image watermarking scheme where a binary watermark is embedded into the largest singular value of each image block in the spatial domain. Several experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed watermarking scheme. The experimental results show that compared with the existing SVD domain watermarking schemes, our proposed method has maintained good robustness against various attacks. Moreover, it avoids the false positive problem existing in traditional SVD-based watermarking schemes and has lower computational complexity.

Robust Image Embedded Watermarking Using DCT and Listless SPIHT

This paper presents a DCT-based (DCT: discrete cosine transform) listless set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) digital watermarking technique that is robust against several common attacks such as cropping, filtering, sharpening, noise, inversion, contrast manipulation, and compression. The proposed technique is made further robust by the incorporation of the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) encryption technique. Our scheme is compared with the recently proposed CRT-based DCT technique, CRT-based spatial domain watermarking, and DCT-based inter block correlation techniques. Extensive simulation experiments show better robustness in common image manipulations and, at the same time, the proposed technique successfully makes the watermark perceptually invisible. A better Tamper Assessment Function (TAF) value of 2–15% and a better Normalized Correlation (NC) is achieved compared to some of the above techniques. In particular, the proposed technique shows better robustness on compression attacks at moderate to higher compression ratios. It is possible to maintain the imperceptibility and low TAF for various values by doubling the capacity of the watermark.