An imperceptible spatial domain color image watermarking scheme

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

The robustness of watermarks to geometric attacks is considered to be the most challenging design requirements for watermarks. Geometric attacks can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence cause incorrect watermark detection. In this paper, a new color image watermarking scheme for copyright protection is proposed. It is based on embedding multiple watermark bits into the luminance component or the blue component of a color image in discrete wavelet domain. The proposed scheme uses image normalization technique to reduce the effect of synchronization errors caused by geometric attacks such as rotation. The extraction process does not require the original image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme successfully makes the watermark perceptually invisible as well as robust to common signal processing and some geometric attacks.

2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP), 2017

This paper proposes an efficient watermarking scheme based on hybrid transform domain. The watermarking scheme is blind, robust and secure. The scheme has been developed to withstand dual attacks which may be combination of signal processing and geometric attacks. For achieving the said goals, a single watermark has been embedded in all the three components (RGB) of the color image using a new interblock differencing method in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used prior to embedding in order to get LL sub-band from each of the three color image components. The principle of maximum probability is applied to select the watermark bit after extracting the watermark from the three components of the color image. Multiple encryption techniques have also been employed in order to increase the security of the watermark. The experimental results prove that the proposed scheme is highly robust to almost all kind of signal processing attacks including ...

A robust, computationally efficient and blind digital image watermarking in spatial domain has been discussed in this paper. Embedded watermark is meaningful and recognizable and recovery process needs only one secret image. Watermark insertion process exploits average brightness of the homogeneity regions of the cover image. Spatial mask of suitable size is used to hide data with less visual impairments. Experimental results show resiliency of the proposed scheme against large blurring attack like mean and Gaussian filtering, non linear filtering like median, image rescaling, symmetric image cropping, lower order bit manipulation of gray values and loss data compression like JPEG with high compression ratio and low PSNR values. Almost as discreetly as the technology itself, digital watermarking has recently made its debut on the geo-imaging stage. This innovative technology is proving to be a cost-effective means of deterring copyright theft of mapping data and of ensuring the authenticity and integrity of asterisked image data. First developed around six years ago, digital watermarking is a sophisticated modern incarnation of steganography-the science of concealing information within other information. In the field of e-commerce, digital watermarking has already established itself as an effective deterrent against copyright theft of photographs and illustrations. Now digital watermarking software is finding uses within national mapping agencies and others working with asterisked images or map data. Current applications range from protecting valuable map data against copyright theft to securing photographic survey or reconnaissance images against tampering.

Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2005

In this article a region based color image watermarking algorithm is presented. The objective of the method is to embed a particular message in each region of interest (ROI) in the image. The embedding message has to be detected after image manipulations such as cropping, rotation and color JPEG compression. As a basis for the watermarking, a segmentation algorithm is used. Based on the extracted regions, characteristic features are estimated by using shape information. The embedding message is synchronized with each ROI on each color component Y, Cr and Cb. To embed information non-rounded DCT coefficients are watermarked. Experimental results show the performance of the algorithm against spatial and frequential attacks.

Conference Paper, 2018

Multiple watermarking techniques for images is receiving more attention in recent years for its wide variety of applications in different fields such as piracy of digital data, and copyrights protection. Current approaches rely on adding many watermarks in different bands or channels by means of scaling factor, and embedding locations that are mainly defined by experts. This brought many challenges in achieving equilibrium between security, robustness, and quality. Aiming to fill the gap of the stationary scaling factor and embedding locations, the work proposed in this paper adapts genetic algorithm to find the optimality of these issues that will enhance both of watermarking capacity and imperceptibility in color images. To increase security, the suggested system encodes the watermarks using 2-D Walsh transform. Furthermore, S ingular value decomposition as a dimension reduction tool is utilized to factorize Wavelet coefficients to determine the most salient embedding locations. Trials results demonstrate that the proposed technique is more robust against common image manipulation attacks in terms of peak signal to noise ratio and normal correlation coefficient.

Third International Conference on Advances In Computing, Control And Networking - ACCN 2015, 2015

Digital image watermarking is a branch of information hiding in which the ownership information will be hidden in the cover image. Performing digital image watermarking, some important issues such as imperceptibility, robustness, capacity and security should be considered. The strength and weakness of each of these issues depends on the watermark algorithm and also the domain in which the watermark has been hidden. In this research we investigate the role of the different domains used in digital image watermarking and categorize them based on the power of the mentioned issues that each domain potentially and innately offers.

2021

In this paper, we have proposed a watermarking system that is based on the spatial domain and is blind and robust in nature. This scheme is developed to withstand most of the image processing attacks. The watermark has been embedded in the cover image by modification of the DC coefficients calculated in the spatial domain. This method directly calculates DC coefficients in the spatial domain. The values of pixels can be changed/modified in the spatial domain in accordance with available watermark information. Since we have avoided the time-consuming transform operation, i.e., Discrete Cosine Transform, the computational efficiency is very high. For embedding a watermark bit, a particular image is disintegrated into 8 × 8 blocks, followed by further division of each block into two 4 × 4 blocks. After calculation of the DC coefficient of each 4 × 4 block, the watermark bit is embedded by modifying the DC values such that the DC coefficient of one block becomes greater than the other. The output results prove our proposed technique is highly robust to commonly occurring signal processing attacks. Experimental results obtained against numerous signal processing attacks are represented in terms of quality measuring parameters like PSNR, SSIM, and BER to check the efficiency and execution of our scheme.

PROC SPIE INT SOC …, 2000

In this paper we present a novel watermarking scheme to generalize a previous proposal by the same authors . In that paper to watermark the image amounts to process the colors in the picture as points in the Color Opponency space and to offset each one of them by a random vector. As an extra constraint, in order to avoid picture quality degradation, the offset applied should be such that a color is not moved outside of a small sphere. The watermarking algorithm processes the colors in the picture as points in the Color Opponency space and offsets each one of them, inside a suitable imperceptive area, by a random vector. To improve robustness we suggest to partition the whole pixels population into "color sets": each set gathers pixels with the same color. Each color set, exceeding a given cardinality, is in turn randomly partitioned into three subsets. Each one of these subsets is hence manipulated in different suitable ways. The watermark is obtained maintaining a record of the statistical distribution of the three subsets. Rigorous theoretical statistical analysis shows that this approach is robust with respect to the most common operations of image processing.

2002 14th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing Proceedings. DSP 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8628), 2002

A novel scheme for the watermarking of colour images is presented in this communication. First objective is to find the most suitable alternative to RGB color space, which is highly correlated. Colour spaces with linear relation to RGB colour space with uncorrelated components are found to be most suitable for watermarking applications. Second objective is to make the scheme adaptive to ôçå colour image. This is achieved by keeping the PSNR in a predefined quality range, while tuning the watermark strength parameter. Watermark detection is fast and blind, i.e. only the watermark generation and coefficient randomization keys are needed, and not the original image. The presented results demonstrate the robustness of the method against some common image processing attacks such as compression, scaling, uniform or gaussian noise addition, median filtering, cropping and multiple watermarking.

Radioengineering, 2015

In this paper we present a robust-encoded watermarking method applied to color images for copyright protection, which presents robustness against several geometric and signal processing distortions. Trade-off between payload, robustness and imperceptibility is a very important aspect which has to be considered when a watermark algorithm is designed. In our proposed scheme, previously to be embedded into the image, the watermark signal is encoded using a convolutional encoder, which can perform forward error correction achieving better robustness performance. Then, the embedding process is carried out through the discrete cosine transform domain (DCT) of an image using the image normalization technique to accomplish robustness against geometric and signal processing distortions. The embedded watermark coded bits are extracted and decoded using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to determine the presence or absence of the watermark into the image we compute the bit error rate (BER) between the recovered and the original watermark data sequence. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the well-known indices: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The color difference between the watermarked and original images is obtained by using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides good performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison among the proposed and previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided.