Watermarking
Script content:
I. Introduction
Description:
A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-
tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify
ownership of the copyright of such signal. "Watermarking" is the process of hiding
digital information in a carrier signal; the hidden information should, but does not
need to, contain a relation to the carrier signal. Digital watermarks may be used to
verify the authenticity or integrity of the carrier signal or to show the identity of its
owners. It is prominently used for tracing copyright infringements and
for banknote authentication.
Like traditional physic watermarks, digital watermarks are often only perceptible
under certain conditions, e.g. after using some algorithm. If a digital watermark
distorts the carrier signal in a way that it becomes easily perceivable, it may be
considered less effective depending on its purpose.[3] Traditional watermarks may be
applied to visible media (like images or video), whereas in digital watermarking, the
signal may be audio, pictures, video, texts or 3D models. A signal may carry several
different watermarks at the same time. Unlike metadata that is added to the carrier
signal, a digital watermark does not change the size of the carrier signal.
The needed properties of a digital watermark depend on the use case in which it is
applied. For marking media files with copyright information, a digital watermark
has to be rather robust against modifications that can be applied to the carrier signal.
Instead, if integrity has to be ensured, a fragile watermark would be applied.
Both steganography and digital watermarking employ steganographic techniques to
embed data covertly in noisy signals. While steganography aims for imperceptibility
to human senses, digital watermarking tries to control the robustness as top priority.
Since a digital copy of data is the same as the original, digital watermarking is a
passive protection tool. It just marks data, but does not degrade it or control access
to the data.
One application of digital watermarking is source tracking. A watermark is
embedded into a digital signal at each point of distribution. If a copy of the work is
found later, then the watermark may be retrieved from the copy and the source of
the distribution is known. This technique reportedly has been used to detect the
source of illegally copied movies.
History:
The term "Digital Watermark" was coined by Andrew Tirkel and Charles Osborne
in December 1992. The first successful embedding and extraction of
a steganographic spread spectrum watermark was demonstrated in 1993 by Andrew
Tirkel, Gerard Rankin, Ron Van Schyndel, Charles Osborne, and others.[4]
Watermarks are identification marks produced during the paper making process.
The first watermarks appeared in Italy during the 13th century, but their use rapidly
spread across Europe. They were used as a means to identify the paper maker or the
trade guild that manufactured the paper. The marks often were created by a wire
sewn onto the paper mold. Watermarks continue to be used today as manufacturer's
marks and to prevent forgery.
Application:
Source tracking (different recipients get differently watermarked content)
Broadcast monitoring (television news often contains watermarked video
from international agencies)
Video authentication
Software crippling on screencasting and video editing software programs,
to encourage users to purchase the full version to remove it.
ID card security
Fraud and Tamper detection.
Content management on social networks[5]
Copyright protection
Life-cycle phrase:
The information to be embedded in a signal is called a digital watermark,
although in some contexts the phrase digital watermark means the
difference between the watermarked signal and the cover signal. The signal
where the watermark is to be embedded is called the host signal. A
watermarking system is usually divided into three distinct steps, embedding,
attack, and detection. In embedding, an algorithm accepts the host and the
data to be embedded, and produces a watermarked signal.
Then the watermarked digital signal is transmitted or stored, usually
transmitted to another person. If this person makes a modification, this is
called an attack. While the modification may not be malicious, the term
attack arises from copyright protection application, where third parties may
attempt to remove the digital watermark through modification. There are
many possible modifications, for example, lossy compression of the data (in
which resolution is diminished), cropping an image or video, or intentionally
adding noise.
Detection (often called extraction) is an algorithm which is applied to the
attacked signal to attempt to extract the watermark from it. If the signal was
unmodified during transmission, then the watermark still is present and it
may be extracted. In robust digital watermarking applications, the extraction
algorithm should be able to produce the watermark correctly, even if the
modifications were strong. In fragile digital watermarking, the extraction
algorithm should fail if any change is made to the signal.
II. Classificition
1. Base on Characteristics
This section categorizes digital watermarking technologies
into five classes accord- ing to the characteristics of
embedded watermarks.
1. Blind versus nonblind
2. Perceptible versus imperceptible
3. Private versus public
4. Robust versus fragile
5. Spatial domain based versus frequency domain based
……..
2. Base on Application
Digital watermarking techniques embed hidden information
directly into the media data. In addition to cryptographic schemes,
watermarking represents an efficient technology to ensure data
integrity as well as data origin authenticity. Copyright, authorized
recipients, or integrity information can be embedded using a
secret key into a host image as a transparent pattern. This section
categorizes digital water- marking technologies into five classes
according to the following applications:
1. Copyright protection
2. Data authentication
3. Fingerprinting
4. Copy control
5. Device control
………
III. Mathematical Preliminarie
3.1 LEAST-SIGNIFICANT-BIT SUBSTITUTION
LSB substitution is often used in image watermarking for
embedding watermarks into a host image. In a grayscale image, a
pixel is represented as eight bits with the most significant bit
(MSB) to the left and the LSB to the right. For example, a pixel with
a gray value of 130 is shown in Figure 3.1a. The idea of LSB
substitution is to replace the LSB of a pixel with the watermark,
because this has little effect on the appearance of the carrier
message. For example, as shown in Figure 3.1b, when the LSB is
changed, the pixel value changes from 130 to 131, which is
undetectable in human perception. If we change bits other than
the LSB, the image will be notice- ably distorted. When we alter the
bit closer to the MSB, the image will be distorted more. For
instance, if we change the MSB, the pixel value 130 will be
changed to 2, as shown in Figure 3.1c. This makes a significant
change to the gray inten- sity. Sometimes, in order to embed more
watermarks, the least number of bits are replaced. Since only the
lower-order bits are altered, the resulting color shifts are typically
imperceptible [1].
In general, the image formats adopted in LSB substitution are
lossless. The LSB method is easy to implement and can possess
high embedding capacity and low visual perceptibility because
every cover bit contains one bit of the hidden message. However,
because the data hidden in the LSB may be known, the LSB
substitution method is impervious to watermark extraction and
some attacks such as cropping and compression.
III.2 DISCRETE FOURIER TRANSFORM
III.3 DISCRETE COSINE TRANSFORM
The Fourier series was originally motivated by the problem of heat
conduction and later found a vast number of applications as well
as providing a basis for other trans- forms, such as the DCT. Many
video and image compression algorithms apply the DCT to
transform an image to the frequency domain and perform
quantization for data compression. This helps separate an image
into parts (or spectral sub-bands) of hierarchical importance (with
respect to the image’s visual quality). A well-known JPEG
technology uses the DCT to compress images.
3.4 DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM
3.5 RANDOM SEQUENCE GENERATION
3.6 CHAOTIC MAP
IV. Digital Watermarking Fundamentals
V. Watermarking Attacks and Tools
1. Image-Processing Attacks
2. Geometric attacks
