Watermark Pattern Research Articles

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.

Detection and Counting of Fake Currency & Genuine Currency Using Image Processing

In today's digital age, the proliferation of counterfeit currency poses a significant challenge to financial institutions and businesses worldwide. The detection and prevention of counterfeit currency transactions require advanced technological solutions to safeguard the integrity of financial systems. In our research, we present a novel approach to tackle this problem by leveraging image processing techniques. The proposed system utilizes state-of-the-art image processing algorithms to distinguish between fake and genuine currency notes accurately. By analyzing various features such as texture, color, and watermark patterns, our system can effectively identify counterfeit currency notes with high precision. Additionally, the system is capable of counting and validating genuine currency notes, providing a comprehensive solution for currency authentication and management. The integration of image processing technology into currency verification systems offers numerous benefits, including enhanced accuracy, speed, and reliability. Our research aims to contribute to the development of robust and efficient solutions for combating counterfeit currency fraud, thereby safeguarding the integrity of financial transactions and promoting trust in monetary systems.

An NGram-Based Copyright Protection for Digital Images

This paper introduces an NGram-based approach for digital images copyright protection. The advantage of the proposed approach compared to the existing works, is that it does not always require the whole elements (e.g., bits) of the watermark pattern to be embedded into the original digital image. This, in turn, allows us to protect the digital images while at the same time minimizing the chances of having low quality marked digital images. The best case occurs when no element of the pattern is embedded into the original digital image. In contrast, the worst case, which rarely happens, occurs when all elements are embedded into the digital image. Moreover, the use of an NGram approach allows us to efficiently and easily reach any part of the image using the corresponding level numbers and addresses. This makes it more efficient especially for complex and high-dimensional data (e.g., images and videos). Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the ability to recover the watermark pattern from the marked digital image even if major changes are applied to the original digital image.

Evaluation of digital watermarking on subjective speech quality

New methods of securing the distribution of audio content have been widely deployed in the last twenty years. Their impact on perceptive quality has, however, only been seldomly the subject of recent extensive research. We review digital speech watermarking state of the art and provide subjective testing of watermarked speech samples. Latest speech watermarking techniques are listed, with their specifics and potential for further development. Their current and possible applications are evaluated. Open-source software designed to embed watermarking patterns in audio files is used to produce a set of samples that satisfies the requirements of modern speech-quality subjective assessments. The patchwork algorithm that is coded in the application is mainly considered in this analysis. Different watermark robustness levels are used, which allow determining the threshold of detection to human listeners. The subjective listening tests are conducted following ITU-T P.800 Recommendation, which precisely defines the conditions and requirements for subjective testing. Further analysis tries to determine the effects of noise and various disturbances on watermarked speech’s perceived quality. A threshold of intelligibility is estimated to allow further openings on speech compression techniques with watermarking. The impact of language or social background is evaluated through an additional experiment involving two groups of listeners. Results show significant robustness of the watermarking implementation, retaining both a reasonable net subjective audio quality and security attributes, despite mild levels of distortion and noise. Extended experiments with Chinese listeners open the door to formulate a hypothesis on perception variations with geographical and social backgrounds.

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.

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.

Image watermarking and fusion based on Fourier single-pixel imaging with weighed light source.

In previous single-pixel imaging systems, the light source was generally idle with respect to time. Here, we propose a novel image fusion and visible watermarking scheme based on Fourier single-pixel imaging (FSPI) with a multiplexed time-varying (TV) signal, which is generated by the watermark pattern hidden in the light source. We call this scheme TV-FSPI. With TV-FSPI, we can realize high-quality visible image watermarking, encrypted image watermarking and full-color visible image watermarking. We also discuss the extension to invisible watermarking based on TV-FSPI. Furthermore, we don't have to recode illumination patterns, because TV-FSPI can be extended to existing mainstream illumination patterns, such as random illumination mode and Hadamard illumination mode. Thus TV-FSPI has the potential to be used in single-pixel broadcasting system and multi-spectral single-pixel imaging system.

A Blind Print-Recapture Robust Watermark Scheme by Calculating Self-Convolution

A blind print-recapture robust watermark scheme is proposed. Watermark patterns are embedded into the space domain of a color image and can be detected from a print-recaptured version of the image without knowledge of the original image. The process of embedding invisible watermarks to convert RGB color images to CIE Lab color spaces and embed periodic watermarks in both color channels at the same time. Watermark extraction is achieved by calculating self-convolution and inverting the geometric transformation such as rotation and scale. Normalized correlation coefficients between the extracted and the embedded watermark pattern is calculated to determine whether there is watermark. The decision about the presence/absence of the watermark pattern is then determined by a threshold which is set 0.13, and the detection rate of 241 pictures is about 0.79.

A multipurpose image watermarking scheme for digital image protection

A multipurpose digital image watermarking scheme is proposed based on the multiple LSB bit substitution method. Fragile and robust watermarks are embedded into the host image for tamper and ownership detection respectively. Randomized insertion is used to insert a fragile watermark pattern to get better tamper detection. Secret keys are used in this scheme to secure data from forged/unauthorized access, which must be known to the end user to extract the watermark from the host. Tampering is done at random locations to cover most of the watermarked image’s area during testing of proposed scheme. Due to blind nature and randomized watermark insertion, high security is obtained. Experimental outcomes represent that the proposed method is able to achieve significant tamper detection. Proposed scheme exhibits robust nature towards common signal processing attacks and provides distortion-less robust watermark in case of no attack. This method also exhibits less execution time due to its time domain insertion methodology. A comparative analysis with the existing schemes shows that the proposed scheme has many features simultaneously such as blind extraction, high embedding capacity, low execution time, significant robustness, acceptable imperceptibility, and multipurpose nature. The proposed scheme can be utilized in fields where rapid response, ownership protection, and tamper detection are prime concerns.

An Optimized Digital Watermarking Approach in Wavelet Domain Based on Whale Optimization Algorithm for Color Image

A newly discovered color watermarking approach is instigating in this paper which is rely upon whale optimization algorithm. YIQ color space is more applicable for the human visual system in the real time applications so the color cover image is changed from RGB color transformation to YIQ color transformation. Moreover, perform three-level discrete wavelet transform - singular value decomposition to luminance component (Y). In the image watermark embedding approach, perform DWT to a watermark gray image after executing the scrambling encryption process using generalized Arnold transform (GAT). The proposed algorithm uses whale optimization algorithm to pick the precise multi-scaling factors. The results from simulation predicated that the proposed watermarking pattern is improved and satisfied the properties of watermarking such as imperceptibility and robustness.

Secure medical health care content protection system (SMCPS) with watermark detection for multi cloud computing environment

The aim of this work is to introduce a new secure system for Medical Healthcare records. The proposed design influences cloud infrastructures to give cost competence, fast exploitation, scalability, and flexibility to have room for unstable workloads. The research system could be utilized to safeguard diverse medical health care records. The proposed Secure Medical Healthcare Content Protection System (SMCPS) system contains of two major steps: (i) Hybrid Key Generation (HKG) and (ii) storage management. In the initial step of the work, keys values are created for medical healthcare records by using two encryption techniques such as Advanced Encoding Standard (AES) cryptography and Message Digest (MD5) algorithm for safe multiparty computation. This proposed HKG algorithm is different from usual key generation algorithm, since the proposed HKG algorithm adds the key values of AES and MD5. New key value is created from these two algorithms, thus increases the security level of the system. The HKG algorithm creates dynamic and representative keys of medical healthcare records, it is computationally resourceful to calculate and contrast in addition it needs small storage. In the second step of the work, Compressive Sensing (CS) based framework for storage management of medical healthcare records. The distributed matching engine achieves greater adaptability and it is created to among different healthcare records gathered from UCI machine learning vault for 100 patients. The applicability is further examined for the applicability of sparse coding-based frameworks including the various numbers of medical healthcare records which influences the ability of Multi Cloud Computing (MCC) environment. The experimentation work are performed by using Miscellaneous database for watermark pattern and any medical healthcare records are taken as input in MCC environment results outcomes prove that safe watermark recognition in the CS domain is possible for medical healthcare records are implemented in JAVA environment. The proposed work provides a CS based watermark recognition which influences safe MCC environment. The results are measured as in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), the Mean Square Error (MSE) and the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), security and communication cost.

A highly robust and secure image watermarking based on classification and visual cryptography

In this paper a new robust image watermarking algorithm based on blocks classification and visual cryptography (VC) is presented. First the original image is decomposed into non-overlapping blocks. Then, we use canny edge detection and the support vector machine (SVM) classification method to categorize these blocks into smooth and non-smooth classes. The VC technique is used to generate two image shares: A master share that is constructed according to the block classification results and an owner share generated by using the master share together with a binary watermark. To verify the ownership of the image, the watermark can be retrieved by stacking the master share and the owner share. By skipping blocks which are not robust against attacks, the robustness of our proposed watermarking method is significantly improved. Our method is completely imperceptible because the watermark pattern is concealed without modifying the original host image.

Robust watermarking in curvelet domain for preserving cleanness of high-quality images

Watermarking inserts invisible data into content to protect copyright. The embedded information provides proof of authorship and facilitates the tracking of illegal distribution, etc. Current robust watermarking techniques have been proposed to preserve inserted copyright information from various attacks, such as content modification and watermark removal attacks. However, since the watermark is inserted in the form of noise, there is an inevitable effect of reducing content visual quality. In general, most robust watermarking techniques tend to have a greater effect on quality, and content creators and users are often reluctant to insert watermarks. Thus, there is a demand for a watermark that maintains maximum image quality, even if the watermark performance is slightly inferior. Therefore, we propose a watermarking technique that maximizes invisibility while maintaining sufficient robustness and data capacity to be applied in real situations. The proposed method minimizes watermarking energy by adopting curvelet domain multi-directional decomposition to maximize invisibility and maximizes robustness against signal processing attacks with a watermarking pattern suitable for curvelet transformation. The method is also robust against geometric attacks by employing the watermark detection method utilizing curvelet characteristics. The proposed method showed very good results of a 57.65 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio in fidelity tests, and the mean opinion score showed that images treated with the proposed method were hardly distinguishable from the originals. The proposed technique also showed good robustness against signal processing and geometric attacks compared with existing techniques.

A novel method for copyright protection of digital videos using SWEA and ZPA technique

Digital copyright protection has become an effective way to prove the ownership and protect the multimedia contents from illegal use and unauthorized users. In order to prove the ownership of a video certain security program is embedded in a video and one of the ways of ensuring the ownership of a video is embedding the watermark in a video. In this paper, a new approach to digital video copyright protection, SWEA (Split watermark embedding algorithm) with Zero Padding Algorithm (ZPA) is proposed. With the help of this algorithm, it is hard to know the original pattern of watermark because of SWEA and minimizing the perceptual degradation of watermarked video because of ZPA. Here we are using ‘db1’ wavelet domain for embedding the watermark in the LL sub-band of the original identical frame (I-frame), based on the energy of high-frequency sub-band in an adaptive manner. SCD (Scene changed detection) is used to find out the identical frame (I-frame). The proposed algorithm has undergone various attacks, such as compression, uniform noise, Gaussian noise frame repetition and frame averaging attacks. The proposed algorithm, sustain all the above attacks and offers improved performance compared with the other methods from the literature.

Improved imperceptible visible watermarking algorithm for auxiliary informationdelivery

An imperceptible visible watermarking (IVW) algorithm is proposed to deliver auxiliary information about the visual contents, including ownership information. The proposed algorithm overcomes several inconveniences presented in previously reported IVW algorithms using the just noticeable difference (JND) criterion, invisible watermarking and binarisation function. The proposed algorithm consists of the visible watermark embedding and the exhibition stages. The JND criterion is used to embed visible watermark pattern in an imperceptible manner by the human visual system, while invisible watermarking based on the discrete cosine transform is used to share crucial parameters between both stages, which makes possible the watermark visualisation without any side information. In the watermark exhibition stage, the imperceptibly embedded visible watermark pattern is exhibited by the binarisation function. The proposed algorithm can be applied to any class of images with different characteristics and several visible watermark patterns can be embedded into an input image. Evaluation results show that performance of the proposed algorithm is better compared with previously reported algorithms from several practical points of view.

Visible Watermarking Assessment Metrics Based on Just Noticeable Distortion

During the last two decades, several visible watermarking algorithms with different characteristics have been proposed. In the context of visible digital watermarking, watermark visibility and its non-obtrusiveness are essential issues. However, assessment metrics were not established to evaluate these two issues until now. Due to the lack of established assessment metrics, visibility is evaluated in a subjective manner and the obtrusiveness caused by the visible watermark is evaluated by well-known image quality metrics, such as peak signal noise ratio, comparing the host image and the watermarked image. In this paper, we propose four assessment metrics for visible watermarking algorithms, in which the global visibility, global obtrusiveness, local obtrusiveness in host edge region, and a global quality of watermarked image are evaluated using a couple of criteria based on the human visual system and a pixel-based just-noticeable distortion function. The evaluation results show the reliability of the proposed metrics used for measuring the above-mentioned aspects when several visible watermarking algorithms are employed as well as in several scenarios where an attempt to remove the watermark pattern from the watermarked content was made.

Effects of JPEG Compression on Reading Optical Watermarking Embedded by Using Color-Difference Modulation

In this paper, we evaluate the readability of optically written watermarking from an image compressed by JPEG. We previously proposed an optical watermarking technique that can protect the portrait rights of real objects. It produces a watermarking pattern in the illumination light by modulating color differences. The illumination light that contains such watermarking is pro-jected onto an object. An image of the object taken by a camera contains the same watermarking, which can be extracted by image processing. Therefore, this technique can protect the portrait rights of real objects. We conducted simulations of capturing an object image illuminated by watermarked light, compressing it by JPEG, and reading embedded information from the decoded image. The simulation results showed that the accuracy in reading out embedded information decreases when captured images are compressed. However, for medium-level or low compression rates 100% accuracy can be expected by using the error correction technique.

A secure and robust block based DWT-SVD image watermarking approach

Now days, the protection of digital data in multimedia communication, in the form of image, text, video and audio has become an important problem because it can be copied and modified easily. Therefore, with the rapid development of the network multimedia systems, content authenticationand copyright protection have become challenging issues. In the past couple of years, a lot of techniques have been proposed to address these issues and digital watermarking technique is one of them. This technique hides a piece of media/information in an original image and this hidden media is used for the purpose of authentication and copyright protection. This study presents a robust image watermarking pattern for hiding watermark into RGB colour component. The Proposed method is based on combined approach of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD), and the quick response code (QR Code) is taken as a watermark image. The original image is divided into horizontally and vertically low and high frequency band using DWT. Moreover, we used second level DWT on low frequency band and the corresponding frequency band is divided into m*n block size. Then we find red, green and blue component of each block and apply SVD on each RGB component of a block to find the singular values for the watermarking. The Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides more security and data authentication compare to other existing image data security approaches.

Adaptive removable visible watermarking technique using dual watermarking for digital color images

This paper proposes a removable visible watermarking system based on a dual watermark technique and blind removal. A visible watermark pattern is embedded in the cosine discrete transform (DCT) domain, taking into consideration the texture and luminance features of the watermark and host images to create a visible watermarked image. To prevent illegal visible watermark removal, the original watermark is embedded in an invisible manner in the visible watermarked image by employing the Quantization Index Modulation-Dither Modulation (QIM-DM) technique, thus ensuring that the original watermark cannot be obtained by malicious attacks. The visible watermark removal process is carried out using only the correct user’s keys, without the need for additional information, such as the original watermark or the original host image, which allows a high-quality image to be obtained; however, if the user’s keys used in the removal process are wrong, the visible watermarked image suffers higher distortion in its content, even in non-visible watermarked regions. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms previous related works in terms of blind removal, preservation of the quality of the unmarked recovered image, and higher visual degradation of the content in the recovered image if an illegal removal attempt is performed.

A SIFT features based blind watermarking for DIBR 3D images

Depth image based rendering (DIBR) is a promising technique for extending viewpoints with a monoscopic center image and its associated per-pixel depth map. With its numerous advantages including low-cost bandwidth, 2D-to-3D compatibility and adjustment of depth condition, DIBR has received much attention in the 3D research community. In the case of a DIBR-based broadcasting system, a malicious adversary can illegally distribute both a center view and synthesized virtual views as 2D and 3D content, respectively. To deal with the issue of copyright protection for DIBR 3D Images, we propose a scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) features based blind watermarking algorithm. To design the proposed method robust against synchronization attacks from DIBR operation, we exploited the parameters of the SIFT features: the location, scale and orientation. Because the DIBR operation is a type of translation transform, the proposed method uses high similarity between the SIFT parameters extracted from a synthesized virtual view and center view images. To enhance the capacity and security, we propose an orientation of keypoints based watermark pattern selection method. In addition, we use the spread spectrum technique for watermark embedding and perceptual masking taking into consideration the imperceptibility. Finally, the effectiveness of the presented method was experimentally verified by comparing with other previous schemes. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust against synchronization attacks from DIBR operation. Furthermore, the proposed method is robust against signal distortions and typical attacks from geometric distortions such as translation and cropping.