Blind MPEG-2 video watermarking in DCT domain robust against scaling

Watermarking techniques that need no original information during watermark detection, known as blind watermarking, are more desirable than informed ones for practical usage and convenience in watermark extraction. A blind MPEG-2 watermarking technique operating in the DCT (discrete cosine transform) domain is presented, which is generally robust against arbitrary ratio scaling, provided that turbo codes are used for error correction. The method can be directly applied to other block-DCT-based video compression techniques. The main advantage of the scheme is its simplicity, blindness and the ability to tailor the watermark payload in a trade-off with other watermark requirements. As synchronisation is automatically obtained from the frames in the scaled video itself, a connection between the source and the target video is not necessary for watermarking detection     

Multiscale fragile watermarking based on the Gaussian mixture model.

In this paper, a new multiscale fragile watermarking scheme based on the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is presented. First, a GMM is developed to describe the statistical characteristics of images in the wavelet domain and an expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to identify GMM model parameters. With wavelet multiscale subspaces being divided into watermarking blocks, the GMM model parameters of different watermarking blocks are adjusted to form certain relationships, which are employed for the presented new fragile watermarking scheme for authentication. An optimal watermark embedding method is developed to achieve minimum watermarking distortion. A secret embedding key is designed to securely embed the fragile watermarks so that the new method is robust to counterfeiting, even when the malicious attackers are fully aware of the watermark embedding algorithm. It is shown that the presented new method can securely embed a message bit stream, such as personal signatures or copyright logos, into a host image as fragile watermarks. Compared with conventional fragile watermark techniques, this new statistical model based method modifies only a small amount of image data such that the distortion on the host image is imperceptible. Meanwhile, with the embedded message bits spreading over the entire image area through the statistical model, the new method can detect and localize image tampering. Besides, the new multiscale implementation of fragile watermarks based on the presented method can help distinguish some normal image operations such as JPEG compression from malicious image attacks and, thus, can be used for semi-fragile watermarking.     

Digital watermarking for telltale tamper proofing andauthentication

In this paper, we consider the problem of digital watermarking to ensure the credibility of multimedia. We specifically address the problem of fragile digital watermarking for the tamper proofing of still images. Applications of our problem include authentication for courtroom evidence, insurance claims, and journalistic photography. We present a novel fragile watermarking approach which embeds a watermark in the discrete wavelet domain of the image by quantizing the corresponding coefficients. Tamper detection is possible in localized spatial and frequency regions. Unlike previously proposed techniques, this novel approach provides information on specific frequencies of the image that have been modified. This allows the user to make application-dependent decisions concerning whether an image, which is JPEG compressed for instance, still has credibility. Analysis is provided to evaluate the performance of the technique to varying system parameters. In addition, we compare the performance of the proposed method to existing fragile watermarking techniques to demonstrate the success and potential of the method for practical multimedia tamper proofing and authentication     

基于水印的视频质量评价研究

在数字媒体传输系统中会出现失真，所以在接收端对数据媒体进行质量评价是重要的。介绍基于水印的图像和视频传输质量评价方法。首先介绍了质量评价的特性、典型模型，然后详细讨论了水印应用、存在的问题等，最后讨论了发展的方向。     

Discrete Multiwavelet–Based Video Watermarking Scheme Using SURF

This paper proposes a robust, imperceptible block‐based digital video watermarking algorithm that makes use of the Speeded Up Robust Feature (SURF) technique. The SURF technique is used to extract the most important features of a video. A discrete multiwavelet transform (DMWT) domain in conjunction with a discrete cosine transform is used for embedding a watermark into feature blocks. The watermark used is a binary image. The proposed algorithm is further improved for robustness by an error‐correction code to protect the watermark against bit errors. The same watermark is embedded temporally for every set of frames of an input video to improve the decoded watermark correlation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DMWT domain video watermarking using SURF features is robust against common image processing attacks, motion JPEG2000 compression, frame averaging, and frame swapping attacks. The quality of a watermarked video under the proposed algorithm is high, demonstrating the imperceptibility of an embedded watermark.     

基于Contourlet-DCT混合变换的零水印算法

为提高水印图像的安全性,并解决水印嵌入时鲁棒性与不可见性之间的矛盾,提出了一种基于Contourlet-DCT混合变换的零水印算法.首先,利用二值水印图像自身不同的像素值对两个混沌序列进行调制加密,并将调制后的结果作为加密的水印图像.接下来对载体图像依次进行Contourlet与DCT变换从中提取能量特征,再对提取的特征进行奇异值分解,选取其中最大的奇异值重组特征矩阵,最后把特征矩阵与加密后的水印图像结合生成注册水印.为验证算法的有效性,将该算法与传统的小波域零水印算法进行了比较,结果表明,混合域零水印算法在多项攻击测试中的鲁棒性均优于后者.     

基于格的灰度级水印技术

提出一个新的灰度级水印算法．首先，使用量化技术对灰度级水印进行预处理，实现灰度级水印的数据压缩；然后，对原始图像进行小波分解，在小波域中使用格矢量量化技术构造水印的嵌人和提取算法．提取水印不需要原图像．为增强水印的安全性，使用混沌序列作为密钥对水印序列进行调制．实验结果表明，与同类算法相比该算法在获得较好感知质量含水印图像的同时提高了水印的鲁棒性．     

Perceptual watermarks for digital images and video

The growth of new imaging technologies has created a need for techniques that can be used for copyright protection of digital images and video. One approach for copyright protection is to introduce an invisible signal, known as a digital watermark, into an image or video sequence. In this paper, we describe digital watermarking techniques, known as perceptually based watermarks, that are designed to exploit aspects of the the human visual system in order to provide a transparent (invisible), yet robust watermark. In the most general sense, any watermarking technique that attempts to incorporate an invisible mark into an image is perceptually based. However, in order to provide transparency and robustness to attack, two conflicting requirements from a signal processing perspective, more sophisticated use of perceptual information in the watermarking process is required. We describe watermarking techniques ranging from simple schemes which incorporate common-sense rules in using perceptual information in the watermarking process, to more elaborate schemes which adapt to local image characteristics based on more formal perceptual models. This review is not meant to be exhaustive; its aim is to provide the reader with an understanding of how the techniques have been evolving as the requirements and applications become better defined     

一类有效的脆弱型数字水印技术

数字水印是多媒体数字产品版权保护和内容抗篡改的重要技术之一.本文在对以往脆弱型数字水印分析基础之上,给出了三种基于混沌系统的脆弱型数字水印技术,充分利用混沌系统对初值敏感和伪噪音等特性,使得相同子块在不同混沌状态下可能隐藏不同的水印信息,从而克服Holliman攻击和矢量拼贴攻击,有力的增强该脆弱型水印技术抵抗恶意攻击的能力.实验结果表明该算法在不破坏宿主图像视觉质量基础上,可精确地检测和定位对图像内容的局部恶意篡改,同时该算法很容易推广到其他数字媒体.     

MPEG-2压缩域的视频数字水印新算法

视频数字水印技术是当前水印研究中的一个热点.本文提出一种视频数字水印新算法,直接对压缩后的视频数据流进行操作,根据运动矢量的特征值,将水印信息嵌入到运动矢量上,不需要完全解码和再编码过程.所提出的水印算法简单、有效,实现了水印盲检.与嵌入水印前的原视频图像相比,嵌入水印后的视频图像信噪比损失很小.     

Blind quality assessment system for multimedia communications using tracing watermarking

This paper presents a novel method to blindly estimate the quality of a multimedia communication link by means of an unconventional use of digital fragile watermarking. Data hiding by digital watermarking is usually employed for multimedia copyright protection, authenticity verification, or similar purposes. However, watermarking is here adopted as a technique to provide a blind measure of the quality of service in multimedia communications. Specifically, a fragile watermark is hidden in an MPEG-like host data video transport stream using a spread-spectrum approach. Like a tracing signal, the watermark tracks the data, where it is embedded, since both the watermark and the host data follow the same communication link. The estimation of the tracing watermark allows dynamically evaluating the effective quality of the provided video services. This depends on the whole physical layer, including the employed video co/decoder. The performed method is based on the evaluation of the mean-square-error between the estimated and the actual watermarks. The proposed technique has been designed for application to wireless multimedia communication systems. According to the results obtained, the sensitivity of the detected tracing watermark on the quality of service (QoS) indices provides for some useful capabilities for analyzing future mobile Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) services.     

Content fragile watermarking for H.264/AVC video authentication

Discrete cosine transform is exploited in this work to generate the authentication data that are treated as a fragile watermark. This watermark is embedded in the motion vectors. The advances in multimedia technologies and digital processing tools have brought with them new challenges for the source and content authentication. To ensure the integrity of the H.264/AVC video stream, we introduce an approach based on a content fragile video watermarking method using an independent authentication of each group of pictures (GOPs) within the video. This technique uses robust visual features extracted from the video pertaining to the set of selected macroblocs (MBs) which hold the best partition mode in a tree-structured motion compensation process. An additional security degree is offered by the proposed method through using a more secured keyed function HMAC-SHA-256 and randomly choosing candidates from already selected MBs. In here, the watermark detection and verification processes are blind, whereas the tampered frames detection is not since it needs the original frames within the tampered GOPs. The proposed scheme achieves an accurate authentication technique with a high fragility and fidelity whilst maintaining the original bitrate and the perceptual quality. Furthermore, its ability to detect the tampered frames in case of spatial, temporal and colour manipulations is confirmed.     

基于H.264低比特率视频流的半脆弱盲水印算法实现

本文提出一种基于H.264低比特率视频流的半脆弱盲水印方法,通过在H.264特有的的帧内预测和运动向量预测中分别嵌入鲁棒水印和脆弱水印,达到版权保护和内容完整性认证的双重目的.通过在嵌入强度和预测模式选择的拉格朗日乘子中引入H.264量化因子,增强了水印对重量化编码的抵抗力,取得更好的率失真平衡,减小水印嵌入对视频流比特率的影响.该算法可以实现水印的快速嵌入提取,满足视频实时处理的要求,实验结果证明了该算法的有效性.     

Self Embedding Watermarking Using Halftoning Technique

This paper proposes a self-embedding watermarking scheme for digital images. It exploits a digital halftoning technique to transform the host image to a halftone image, in which the content features of the host image are well preserved. This halftone image is utilized as an approximate or compressed version of the host image and further adopted as a watermark. Unlike most available self-embedding watermarking techniques, in which watermark embedding, tamper detection and image recovery are block-wise-based, our scheme is a pixel-wise and block-wise composite scheme. That is, the watermark is pixel-wise permuted and embedded in the least-significant-bit plane of the host image, while in tamper detection and image recovery, a block-wise strategy is employed. This pixel-wise and block-wise complementary mechanism can overcome a common disadvantage of previous block-wise-based self-embedding watermarking techniques. Our scheme can be used for tamper detection and alteration location. Moreover, the tampered area can be approximately recovered using the extracted watermark. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

一种新颖的基于非压缩数字视频的水印盲检测算法

数字水印是一种嵌入到多媒体数据中用来进行版权标识的工具。在众多的宿主媒体中，数字视频因具有隐藏容量大、透明性好、鲁棒性强等诸多优点而受到日益广泛的关注。但是很多文献中提到的视频水印都是从数据流中提取单帧图像进行处理，这类算法与静态图像的水印方法如出一辙，没有充分利用视频文件的各种特性。而且对帧平均、视频压缩等常见的运动图像攻击方法十分敏感。针对这些问题，本文以非压缩视频文件为实验对象，结合人类视觉模型和彩色图像场景分割的方法，提出并实现了一种基于视频时间轴的数字水印盲检测算法。实验结果表明算法有效实用。     

Hiding digital watermarks using multiresolution wavelet transform

In this paper, an image accreditation technique by embedding digital watermarks in images is proposed. The proposed method for the digital watermarking is based on the wavelet transform. This is unlike most previous work, which used a random number of a sequence of bits as a watermark and where the watermark can only be detected by comparing an experimental threshold value to determine whether a sequence of random signals is the watermark. The proposed approach embeds a watermark with visual recognizable patterns, such as binary, gray, or color image in images by modifying the frequency part of the images. In the proposed approach, an original image is decomposed into wavelet coefficients. Then, multi-energy watermarking scheme based on the qualified significant wavelet tree (QSWT) is used to achieve the robustness of the watermarking. Unlike other watermarking techniques that use a single casting energy, QSWT adopts adaptive casting energy in different resolutions. The performance of the proposed watermarking is robust to a variety of signal distortions, such as JPEG, image cropping, sharpening, median filtering, and incorporating attacks     

Watermark detection based on the properties of error control codes

Watermark detection is a topic which is seldom addressed in the watermarking literature. Most authors concentrate on developing novel watermarking algorithms. In a practical watermarking system, however, one must be able to distinguish between watermarked and unwatermarked documents. Many existing systems belong to the class of so called 'yes/no' watermarks, where the detector correlates the candidate image with some known sequence to determine whether a mark is present. Unfortunately, these watermarks often carry no extra information and are not very useful. On the other hand, multi-bit watermarking schemes typically use a separate reference watermark and the payload of the watermark is decoded only when this reference watermark is successfully detected in the received image. It is shown that it is not necessary to use a reference watermark for detection purposes if the watermark payload is encoded with an error control code. One can then put all the energy into the payload watermark and increase its robustness. The turbo code is used as an example of error control codes in the work presented, and simulation results using an algorithm based on the authors' previous work verifies their theory.     

Efficient video watermarking based on singular value decomposition in the discrete wavelet transform domain

This paper presents an efficient, robust, and imperceptible video watermarking technique based on singular value decomposition (SVD) performed in the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. In the proposed DWT-based SVD video watermarking method, the video frames are transformed with the DWT using two resolution levels. The high frequency band HH and the middle frequency bands LH and HL are SVD transformed and the watermark is hidden in them. The proposed DWT-based SVD video watermarking method is characterized by two improvements: (1) a cascade of two powerful mathematical transforms; the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)-based SVD using additive method, and (2) an error correction code is applied and embeds the watermark with spatial and temporal redundancy. The aim of these improvements is to increase robustness against attacks based on video characteristics and the robustness against image processing attacks, realize high security level, protect the watermark against bit errors and obtain good perceptual quality. The proposed DWT-based SVD video watermarking method has been tested in the presence of video and image processing attacks and experimental results proved that the proposed DWT-based SVD video watermarking method survives attacks based on video characteristics and image processing techniques.     

Digital watermarking robust to geometric distortions.

In this paper, we present two watermarking approaches that are robust to geometric distortions. The first approach is based on image normalization, in which both watermark embedding and extraction are carried out with respect to an image normalized to meet a set of predefined moment criteria. We propose a new normalization procedure, which is invariant to affine transform attacks. The resulting watermarking scheme is suitable for public watermarking applications, where the original image is not available for watermark extraction. The second approach is based on a watermark resynchronization scheme aimed to alleviate the effects of random bending attacks. In this scheme, a deformable mesh is used to correct the distortion caused by the attack. The watermark is then extracted from the corrected image. In contrast to the first scheme, the latter is suitable for private watermarking applications, where the original image is necessary for watermark detection. In both schemes, we employ a direct-sequence code division multiple access approach to embed a multibit watermark in the discrete cosine transform domain of the image. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed watermarking schemes are robust to a wide range of geometric attacks.     

一种能区分水印或内容篡改的脆弱水印算法

针对目前脆弱水印算法大多无法区分水印被篡改还是内容被篡改的问题,本文基于多重水印技术提出了一种能区分水印或内容篡改的脆弱水印算法.该算法由子块的主要DCT系数生成恢复水印,将其嵌入到偏移子块的次低位;待恢复水印嵌入后,将恢复水印作为子块内容的一部分生成认证水印,将其嵌入到子块的最低位.理论分析和实验结果表明:本文算法在抵抗量化攻击的同时,不仅能准确定位图像内容被篡改的位置,而且能区分是水印被篡改还是图像内容被篡改,并且在一定条件下可以对内容被篡改的区域进行恢复.