Provably robust digital watermarking (original) (raw)
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IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2001
We consider the problem of embedding one signal (e.g., a digital watermark), within another "host" signal to form a third, "composite" signal. The embedding is designed to achieve efficient tradeoffs among the three conflicting goals of maximizing information-embedding rate, minimizing distortion between the host signal and composite signal, and maximizing the robustness of the embedding. We introduce new classes of embedding methods, termed quantization index modulation (QIM) and distortion-compensated QIM (DC-QIM), and develop convenient realizations in the form of what we refer to as dither modulation. Using deterministic models to evaluate digital watermarking methods, we show that QIM is "provably good" against arbitrary bounded and fully informed attacks, which arise in several copyright applications, and in particular, it achieves provably better rate distortion-robustness tradeoffs than currently popular spread-spectrum and low-bit(s) modulation methods. Furthermore, we show that for some important classes of probabilistic models, DC-QIM is optimal (capacity-achieving) and regular QIM is near-optimal. These include both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, which may be good models for hybrid transmission applications such as digital audio broadcasting, and mean-square-error-constrained attack channels that model private-key watermarking applications.
Design and evaluation of sparse quantization index modulation watermarking schemes
Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXI, 2008
In the past decade the use of digital data has increased significantly. The advantages of digital data are, amongst others, easy editing, fast, cheap and cross-platform distribution and compact storage. The most crucial disadvantages are the unauthorized copying and copyright issues, by which authors and license holders can suffer considerable financial losses. Many inexpensive methods are readily available for editing digital data and, unlike analog information, the reproduction in the digital case is simple and robust. Hence, there is great interest in developing technology that helps to protect the integrity of a digital work and the copyrights of its owners. Watermarking, which is the embedding of a signal (known as the watermark) into the original digital data, is one method that has been proposed for the protection of digital media elements such as audio, video and images. In this article, we examine watermarking schemes for still images, based on selective quantization of the coefficients of a wavelet transformed image, i.e. sparse quantization-index modulation (QIM) watermarking. Different grouping schemes for the wavelet coefficients are evaluated and experimentally verified for robustness against several attacks. Wavelet tree-based grouping schemes yield a slightly improved performance over block-based grouping schemes. Additionally, the impact of the deployment of error correction codes on the most promising configurations is examined. The utilization of BCH-codes (Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri, Hocquenghem) results in an improved robustness as long as the capacity of the error codes is not exceeded (cliff-effect).
Improved Robust Watermarking Based on Rational Dither Modulation
Rational dither modulation (RDM) watermarking was presented to resist amplitude scaling attack. This property is achieved by quantizing the ratio of consecutive samples instead of samples themselves. In this paper, we improve the performance of basic RDM watermarking to resist more types of watermark-ing attacks. We improve the robustness of our modified RDM watermarking by the following three aspects: 1) The quantization step size is increased by modifying two coefficients instead of only one coefficient in the basic RDM method, 2) Several modification rules are defined to reduce embedding distortion, and 3) The coefficients with larger magnitudes in the lowest sub-band in DWT domain are selected to embed watermark. A variety of attacks are implemented to evaluate the performance of our method. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the basic RDM method and two state-of-the-art watermark-ing methods over a wide range of attacks and it also has good imperceptibility.
Multi-bit Watermark Embedding using Dither Modulation
2015
In this paper we investigate the use of four way dither modulation for high capacity watermark embedding and compare it with conventional approach of binary dither modulation. The embedding is performed in the invariant domain using Zernike moments as these moments provide minimum information redundancy, excellent resistance to noise and possess good image reconstruction capabilities. We have performed detailed experimentation to perform exhaustive comparative analysis of the two embedding methods in terms of visual imperceptibility and robustness to various geometric attacks as well as signal processing attacks.
Angle QIM: a novel watermark embedding scheme robust against amplitude scaling distortions
2005
Quantization index modulation (QIM) watermarking has received a great deal of attention ever since the rediscovery of Costa's result on codes with host-interference rejecting properties. While such embedding scheme exhibit considerable improvement in watermark capacity over its earlier predecessors, (e.g. spread-spectrum), their fragility to even the simplest attacks soon became apparent. Among such attacks, amplitude scaling has received special attention. In this paper, we introduce a quantization scheme that is provably insensitive to amplitude scaling attacks, named Angle QIM (AQIM). Instead of embedding information by quantizing the amplitude of pixel values, AQIM works by quantizing the angle formed by the host-signal vector with the origin of a hyperspherical coordinate system. Hence, AQIM's invariance to amplitude scaling can be shown by construction. Experimental results are presented for the bit error rate performance of AQIM under additive white Gaussian noise attacks.
Digital Video Watermarking Based on Quantization Index Modulation
Nowadays, due to advent in emerging technologies and networking services, it has become extremely important to protect and authenticate the digital data (images, audio and video) which is used for processing and distribution. A watermarking technique based on 3-D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) for video security, authentication and copyright protection is discussed in this paper. Video watermarking embeds a permanent message signal in a video sequence in order to protect the video from illegal copying. The presented watermarking algorithm works in frequency domain utilizing the concept of QIM. The binary watermark is transformed into its bit planes. The first four Most Significant Bit planes are extracted and embedded into video frames. Blind watermark extraction is adopted using Inverse QIM and Minimum Distance Decoder. The proposed algorithm is evaluated for robustness and various attacks like JPEG compression, noising, luminance modificati...
Quantization-based watermarking performance improvement using host statistics
Proceedings of the 2004 multimedia and security workshop on Multimedia and security - MM&Sec '04, 2004
In this paper we consider the problem of performance improvement of known-host-state (quantization-based) watermarking methods undergo Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN) attack. The motivation of our research is twofold. The first reason concerns the common belief that any knowledge about the host image taken into account designing quantization-based watermarking algorithms can not improve their performance. The second reason refers to the poor practical performance of this class of methods at low Watermark-to-Noise Ratio (W N R) regime in comparison to the known-host-statistics techniques when AWGN attack is applied. We demonstrate in this paper that bit error probability of Dither Modulation (DM) and Distortion-Compensated Dither Modulation (DC-DM) against AWGN attack can be significantly reduced when the quantizers are designed using the statistics of the host data. For the case when the statistics of the data correspond to i.i.d. Laplacian distribution and using Uniform Deadzone Quantizer (UDQ) we develop close-form analytical models for the analysis of bit error probability of DM and DC-DM. Results of performed experiments demonstrate that significant performance improvement of classical DM and DC-DM with respect to bit error probability can be achieved with the minor increase of design complexity.
A Robust Watermarking Technique Resistant JPEG Compression
The increasing popularity of the internet means that digital multimedia are transmitted more rapidly and easily. There is also a greater focus on intellectual property and copyright protection. To prevent piracy and other illegal activities, watermarking is a technique used to protect media data on the internet. An effective watermarking system based on a quantization index modulation (QIM) algorithm in the frequency domain is proposed to achieve copyright protection. The advantages of this approach are that it resists high JPEG compression ratios and maintains good image quality. The procedure consists of two steps: design of a robust embedding mechanism, and embedding and detection of the watermark. In the first step the robust embedding points and values for each image in the JPEG compression are identified. In the second step the QIM algorithm is used to insert a watermark into the image, and then a secure key is recorded. For detection, the embedded watermark is easily extracted using the secure key. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique can survive JPEG high compression ratios with good invisibility and robustness.
An audio watermarking scheme using singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2011
Quantization index modulation is one of the best methods for performing blind watermarking, due to its simplicity and good rate-distortion-robustness tradeoffs. In this paper, a new audio watermarking algorithm based on singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization is presented. The watermark is embedded using dither-modulation quantization of the singular values of the blocks of the host audio signal. The watermark can be blindly extracted without the knowledge of the original audio signal. Subjective and objective tests confirm high imperceptibility achieved by the proposed scheme. Moreover, the scheme is quite robust against attacks including additive white Gaussian noise, MP3 compression, resampling, low-pass filtering, requantization, cropping, echo addition and denoising. The watermark data payload of the algorithm is 196 bps. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme shows low error probability rates.
Improved embedding efficiency and AWGN robustness for SS watermarks via pre-coding [6819-51]
2008
Spread spectrum (SS) modulation is utilized in many watermarking applications because it offers exceptional robustness against several attacks. The embedding rate-distortion performance of SS embedding however, is relatively weak compared to quantization index modulation (QIM). This limits the relative embedding rate of SS watermarks. In this paper, we illustrate that both the embedding efficiency, i.e. bits embedded per unit distortion and robustness against additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) can be improved by pre-coding of message followed by constellation adjustment on the SS detector to minimize the distortion on the cover image introduced by coded data. Our pre-coding method encodes p bits as a 2 p × 1 binary vector with a single nonzero entry whose index indicates the value of the embedded bits. Our analysis show that the method improves embedding rate by approximately p/4 without increasing embedding distortion or sacrificing robustness to AWGN attacks. Experimental evaluation of the method using a set theoretic embedding framework for the watermark insertion validates our analysis.