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On the Robustness and Security of Digital Image Watermarking
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In most of the digital image watermarking schemes, it becomes a common practice to address security in terms of robustness, which is basically a norm in cryptography. Such consideration in developing and evaluation of a watermarking scheme may severely affect the performance and render the scheme ultimately unusable. This paper provides an explicit theoretical analysis towards watermarking security and robustness in figuring out the exact problem status from the literature. With the necessary hypotheses and analyses from technical perspective, we demonstrate the fundamental realization of the problem. Finally, some necessary recommendations are made for complete assessment of watermarking security and robustness.
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... Secret keys act a very significant role in watermarking schemes, the keys not only provide security but they can also influence robustness of watermarking systems. Watermarking scheme is defined as robust if the detector can successfully detect the watermark in processed image [4].On the other hand, watermarking security is defined as the ability of the watermark to withstand against different types of attacks [4]. SVD 1 is one of the most useful tools in linear algebra with several applications in image compression, watermarking, and other signal processing areas [5]. ...
... Secret keys act a very significant role in watermarking schemes, the keys not only provide security but they can also influence robustness of watermarking systems. Watermarking scheme is defined as robust if the detector can successfully detect the watermark in processed image [4].On the other hand, watermarking security is defined as the ability of the watermark to withstand against different types of attacks [4]. SVD 1 is one of the most useful tools in linear algebra with several applications in image compression, watermarking, and other signal processing areas [5]. ...
Digital watermarking is widely used to verify the authenticity or integrity of multimedia contents, such as images and videos. In the last few years, a well-known numerical tool called singular value decomposition (SVD) has received much attention from the watermarking community. Designers of SVD-based schemes usually use dewatermarking tools such as Stirmark to prove the robustness of their schemes. Although, these tools are valuable but their attacks usually reduce the quality of watermarked images. On the other hand, there is another group of attacks in which the attacker needs to know the watermarking algorithm to perform the attack. In this paper, an attack in this group has been designed to remove the watermark from a specific SVD-based watermarking scheme [1]. The attack tries to change the exact space where watermark has been embedded. The experiments show our attack makes fewer changes to remove embedded watermark than other distortions available in Stirmark, so the quality of attacked image is better than processed image by using Stirmark in terms of PSNR.
... Nowadays, the necessity of copyright protection in digital media has led to a massive growth in the field of digital watermarking, where researchers are motivated to devise innovative solutions for ownership protection [7,38]. ...
In this paper, an analysis on hybrid Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for image watermarking is carried out to investigate the effect of a deeper level of the SVD on imperceptibility and robustness to resist common signal processing and geometric attacks. For this purpose, we have designed two hybrid watermarking schemes, the first one with DWT and first level of SVD, whereas, in the second scheme, the same design is employed with a second level of SVD. In this experiment, a comprehensive analysis is performed on the two designed schemes and the effect of robustness and imperceptibility is compared in the first and second levels of SVD in each DWT sub-band. Having analyzed more than 100 medical and non-medical images in standard datasets and real medical samples of patients, the experimental outcomes show a remarkable increase in both imperceptibility and robustness in the second level of SVD, in comparison to the first level. In addition, the achieved result shows that the SVD2 scheme offers the highest imperceptibility in the LL sub-band (more than 60 dB on average PSNR), with satisfactory robustness against noise attacks, but less persistence in some geometric attacks such as cropping. For the HH sub-band, strong robustness against all types of tested of attacks is obtained, though its imperceptibility is slightly lower than the achieved PSNR in the LL sub-band. In HH sub-band, an average growth of 5 dB in PSNR and 2% in NC can be observed from the second level of SVD in comparison to the first level. These results make SVD2 a good candidate for content protection, especially for medical images.
We propose the engraving of a unique interference pattern on metal with the use of high-energy 1064 nm laser pulses fired through a Fresnel biprism (FB). The grating is patterned with 500 patterns for 5 ns, and the spacing of patterns can be adjusted according to the physical value of FB. By rotating the FB, the interference pattern is machined into metal to produce an encrypted iridescent character. Encrypted letters are engraved via assigning a serial number and corporate logos to a product (on which the metal is affixed) according to the viewing angle of the interference fringe. The resulting iridescently colored letters or numbers are visible according to their viewing direction. By superimposing letters and numbers, it is possible to store complex passwords, and forgery/counterfeiting can be easily detected by merely using the naked eye and an angle meter.
Les réseaux de capteurs sans fil d'images sont utilisés aujourd'hui dans de nombreuses applications qui diffèrent par leurs objectifs et leurs contraintes individuelles. Toutefois, le dénominateur commun de toutes les applications de réseaux de capteurs reste la vulnérabilité des noeuds-capteurs en raison de leurs ressources matérielles limitées dont la plus contraignante est l'énergie. En effet, les technologies sans fil disponibles dans ce type de réseaux sont généralement à faible portée, et les ressources matérielles (CPU, batterie) sont également de faible puissance. Il faut donc répondre à un double objectif : l'efficacité d'une solution tout en offrant une bonne qualité d'image à la réception. La contribution de cette thèse porte principalement sur l'étude des méthodes de traitement et de compression d'images au noeud-caméra, nous avons proposé une nouvelle méthode de compression d'images qui permet d'améliorer l'efficacité énergétique des réseaux de capteurs sans fil. Des expérimentations sur une plate-forme réelle de réseau de capteurs d'images ont été réalisées afin de démontrer la validité de nos propositions, en mesurant des aspects telles que la quantité de mémoire requise pour l'implantation logicielle de nos algorithmes, leur consommation d'énergie et leur temps d'exécution. Nous présentons aussi, les résultats de synthèse de la chaine de compression proposée sur des systèmes à puce FPGA et ASIC
This paper proposes new watermarking technique based on tetrolet domain. The tetrolet transform is a new adaptive Haar-type wavelet transform based on tetrominoes. It avoids Gibbs oscillation because it applies the Haar function at the edge of the image. Our proposed watermarking algorithm embeds the watermark into the tetrolet coefficients which are selected by considering different of shapes tetrominoes. We evaluated the effectiveness of the watermarking approach by considering the quality metrics like RMSE, PSNR and Robustness parameters. The experimental results reveal that the proposed watermarking scheme is robust against common image processing attacks.
This research paper discussed the usage of watermarking in medical images to ensure the authenticity and integrity of the image and reviewed some watermarking schemes that had been developed. A design of a reversible tamper detection and recovery watermarking scheme was then proposed. The watermarking scheme uses a 640×480×8 bits ultrasound grayscale image as a sample. The concept of ROI (Region Of Interest) and RONI (Region Of Non Interest) were applied. Watermark embedded can be used to detect tampering and recovery of the image can be done. The watermark is also reversible.
Although it is clear that security is an important issue in digital watermarking applications, the main concerns ad-dressed by the current literature are robustness, capacity and imperceptibility. The inadequacy of the prevailing de-sign paradigm in tackling security issues is mainly due to an incomplete assessment of the threat model. The goal of this paper is to take a detailed and rigorous look at the threat model for a variety of watermarking applications. In this extended abstract, we outline the security requirements for a few common watermarking applications and explore in more detail the threat model for a specific application that involves establishing ownership of multimedia content.
Digital watermarking studies have always been driven by the improvement of robustness. Most of articles of this field deal with this criterion, presenting more and more impressive experimental assessments. Some key events in this quest are the use of spread spectrum, the invention of resynchronization schemes, the discovery of side information channel, and the formulation of the opponent actions as a game.
On the contrary, security received little attention in the watermarking community. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of this recent topic. We list the typical applications which requires a secure watermarking technique. For each context, a threat analysis is purposed. This presentation allows us to illustrate all the certainties the community has on the subject, browsing all key papers. The end of the paper is devoted to what remains not clear, intuitions and future studies.
Watermarking is the practice of imperceptibly altering a piece of data in order to embed information about the data. According to the definition there are two important characteristics of watermarking. First, information embedding should not cause perceptible changes to the host medium. Second, the message should be related to the host medium. In this sense, the watermarking techniques form a subset of information hiding techniques, which also include cases where the hidden information is not related to the host medium. This chapter reviews the main application domains of watermarking. Properties and classification schemes of watermarking techniques are presented followed by the basic functional modules of a watermarking scheme. Further, the principles and techniques devised for two major application areas, namely copyright protection and authentication are discussed.
In this paper, security evaluation of an important watermarking class based on quantization is given. Theoretical developments and practical simulations are used to measure the security level of watermarking techniques. We give the contribution of each observation available to the attacker on the total gathered information about the watermarking secrecy. By leading on watermarking technique weaknesses, we find that using the Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) with continuous secret key is equivalent to using a secret key with two states. The latter is easier to estimate than a continuous key. Then, we propose a secure version of a classical trellis coded quantization watermarking. The security is guaranteed thanks to the trellis path generated from the discrete key and the message. We show that the spread transform can represent a second or alternative security level for watermarking systems. It allows to increase the watermarking security level and to keep the embedded message hard to read for unauthorise user.
Protection against geometric distortions and common image processing operations with blind detection becomes a much challenging task in image watermarking. To achieve this, in this paper we propose a content-based watermarking scheme that combines the invariant feature extraction with watermark embedding by using Tchebichef moments. Harris-Laplace detector is first adopted to extract feature points, and then non-overlapped disks centered at feature points are generated. These disks are invariant to scaling and translation distortions. For each disk, orientation alignment is then performed to achieve rotation invariant. Finally, the watermark is embedded in magnitudes of Tchebichef moments of each disk via dither modulation to realize the robustness to common image processing operations and the blind detection. Thorough simulation results obtained by using the standard benchmark, Stirmark, demonstrate that the proposed method is robust against various geometric distortions as well as common image processing operations and outperforms representative image watermarking schemes.
This paper presents a content-based digital image-watermarking scheme, which is robust against a variety of common image-processing attacks and geometric distortions. The image content is represented by important feature points obtained by our image-texture-based adaptive Harris corner detector. These important feature points are geometrically significant and therefore are capable of determining the possible geometric attacks with the aid of the Delaunay-tessellation-based triangle matching method. The watermark is encoded by both the error correcting codes and the spread spectrum technique to improve the detection accuracy and ensure a large measure of security against unintentional or intentional attacks. An image-content-based adaptive embedding scheme is applied in discrete Fourier transform (DFT) domain of each perceptually high textured subimage to ensure better visual quality and more robustness. The watermark detection decision is based on the number of matched bits between the recovered and embedded watermarks in embedding subimages. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method against any combination of the geometric distortions and various common image-processing operations such as JPEG compression, filtering, enhancement, and quantization. Our proposed system also yields a better performance as compared with some peer systems in the literature.
The analysis of the security of watermarking algorithms has received increasing attention since it has been recognized that the sole investigation of robustness issues is not enough to properly address the challenges set by practical applications. Such a security analysis, though, is still in its infancy, up to a point that a general agreement has not yet been reached even on the most fundamental problems. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general security framework encompassing most of the problems encountered in real-world applications. By considering the amount of information the attacker has about the watermarking algorithm, we introduce the notion of fair and un-fair attacks, so to ease the classification of different systems and attacks. Though we recognize that many important differences exist between watermarking and cryptographic security, a large part of our work is inspired by the Diffie-Helmann's paradigm, which is widely used in cryptography. For each class of systems great care is taken to describe both the attacker's and watermarker's point of view, presenting the challenges raised by each system to these different actors. Finally, we try to outline some research directions which, according to us, deserve further analysis.
In this paper, a robust watermark scheme for copyright protection is proposed. By modifying the original image in transform domain and embedding a watermark in the difference values between the original image and its reference image, the proposed scheme overcomes the weak robustness problem of embedding a watermark in the spatial domain. Besides, the watermark extraction does not require the original image so it is more practical in real application. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides not only good image quality, but is also robust against various attacks, such as JPEG lossy compression, filtering and noise addition.