INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES

IN
DIGITAL WATERMARKING

BY

C.RAGHAVENDRA S.V.JAGADEESH
III CSE, RGMCET, III CSE, RGMCET,
NANDYAL. NANDYAL.

1
 DIGITALWATER MARK

ABSTRACT
The technique of watermarking paper (rather than heads) is
almost as old as paper manufacturing itself, dating back to the
late middle ages. Their earliest use seems to have been to record
the manufacturer’s trademark on the product so that the
authenticity could be clearly established without degrading the
aesthetics and utility of the stock. Experience with watermarks
was so successful, that governments began to watermark their
currencies, postage stamps, revenue stamps, etc. to thwart
counterfeiting.

2
 Watermarking is the process of embedding the code in to
the multimedia object such that the watermark can be extracted
later to make an assertion of about the object. The code can be
audio, video or textual data. The code contains the information
about the right owner of the object. This paper highlights the
difference between stenography, encryption and watermarking.
And also simple technique on water marking are proposed and
implemented.

1.Introduction

In the Middle Ages, kings, dukes, barons, and anyone else

who styled themselves important would carve a design onto a
stamp or a ring. This was used to impress a wax or lead closure
sealing the wrappings of items sent by courier, ostensibly proving
that the document or package did indeed come from them and
hence could be considered authentic. cryptographic secret key,
inhibiting anybody that does not possess the secret key from
reading or even detecting the watermark.The idea is to ensure
the Watermarking is a method of protecting digital material. The
digital watermarking system is based on that a code is embedded
in the image. The code can include various types of information
for example ownership of the image, right to copy and terminal
identification (a specific number for each user the image has
been distributed to). The code is digitized, encoded as additional
noise and incorporated in the picture. The size of the encoded
information has to be kept to a minimum of bits to minimize

3
noise. Every member has an unique code that works as an index
to the register. This code is encoded into the image.

2 Different ways of providing security

The security for the data, transmitting through high speed

data networks can be provided in 4 different ways as follows

(a) Cryptography: It is the process of disguising a

message in such a way as to hide its substance by using keys. i.e.
the message which is to be sent through the network is encoded
using cryptographic algorithm, the resulting text is called cipher
text. This is transmitted through the network. At the receiving
end the cipher text is decoded and the original text is obtained.
In this the security is entirely dependent on cryptographic
algorithm.

(b) Steganography: It is the process of hiding secrete

message inside another message, such that the very existence of
secrete is concealed. Generally the sender writes an innocuous
message and then conceals a secrete message on the same
piece of paper. Historical tricks include invisible inks, tiny pin
punctures on selected characters, minute differences between
handwritten characters, pencil marks on type written characters,
grilles which cover most of the message except for a few
characters, and so on.

4
 © Time stamping: It is the process of adding time to the
data without regard to the physical medium on which it resides.
With the help of time we can identify the right owner of the
intellectual property.

(d) Watermarking: It is the process of embedding the code into multimedia

object.
2.1 Types of watermarks

There are different varieties of watermarks are available

depending on different factors under consideration, one of such
factor is visibility. Depending on visibility watermarks are
classified as

2.2.1 Visible watermarks

A visible watermark is a visible translucent image which is

overlaid on the primary image. Perhaps consisting of the logo or
seal of the organization which holds the rights to the primary
image, it allows the primary image to be viewed, but still marks it
clearly as the property of the owning organization.

It is important to overlay the watermark in a way which

makes it difficult to remove. An example shows both a watermark
and an image with the watermark overlaid.

2.2.2 Invisible watermarks

5
 An invisible watermark is an overlaid image which cannot
be seen, but which can be detected algorithmically. Different
applications of this technology call for two very different types of
invisible watermarks:

(i) A watermark which is destroyed when the image is

manipulated digitally in any way may be useful in proving
authenticity of an image. If the watermark is still intact, then the
image has not been "doctored." If the watermark has been
destroyed, then the image has been tampered with. Such a
technology might be important, for example, in admitting digital
images as evidence in court.

(ii) An invisible watermark which is very resistant to

destruction under any image manipulation might be useful in
verifying ownership of an image suspected of misappropriation.
Digital detection of the watermark would indicate the source of
the image.

2.2 Properties of watermark

(i) Unobtrusive: The watermark should be perceptually

invisible, or its presence should not interfere with the object
being protected.

(ii) Robust: The watermark must be difficult (hopefully

impossible) to remove. If only partial knowledge is available (for
example, the exact location of the watermark in an image is

6
unknown) then attempts to remove or destroy a watermark,
should result in severe degradation in fidelity before the
watermark is lost. In particular, the watermark should be robust
to :

(a) Common signal processing: The watermark should still

be retrievable even if common signal processing operations are
applied to the data. These include, digital to analog and analog to
digital conversion, resampling, requantization (including dithering
and recompression), and common signal enhancements to image
contrast and color, or audio bass and treble, for example.

(b) Common geometric distortions (image and video

data): Watermarks in image and video data should also be
immune from geometric image operations such as rotation,
translation, cropping and scaling.

© Subterfuge Attacks: Collusion and Forgery In addition, the

watermark should be robust to collusion by multiple individuals
who each possess a watermarked copy of the data. That is, the
watermark should be robust to combining copies of the same
data set to destroy the watermarks.

Further, if a digital watermark is to be used in litigation, it

must be impossible for colluders to combine their images to
generate a different valid watermark with the intention of framing
a third party.

7
 (iii) Universal: The same digital watermarking algorithm
should apply to all three media under consideration. This is
potentially helpful in the watermarking of multimedia products.
Also, this feature is conducive to implementation of audio and
image/video watermarking algorithms on common hardware.

(iv) Unambiguous: Retrieval of the watermark should

unambiguously identify the owner. Furthermore, the accuracy of
owner identification should degrade gracefully in the face of
attack.

3.Methodology
3.1 Fragile invisible watermark technique

As we know a digital image can be considered to be a two

dimensional array of values or sampled image intensities in the
form of gray levels. Each gray level is quantized or assigned one
of finite set of numbers represented by fixed number of bits, for
monochrome gray level image it is 8-bits. Each pixel gray level
value stored in these 8-bits, but as we know the LSB of each pixel
contains least information of the image gray level because after
all it can effect the gray level value by an amount 1. Hence by
making all these LSB’s to zero in each pixel value, the human
visual system can’t find the difference to this image and original
image. Hence, we can use these LSB”s to hide our watermark or
copy right information in the LSB’s of image pixels. The process is
explained as follows…

8
 a) read the ASCII value of the first character in the message
or watermark (ASCII character contains 8-bits)

b) place the 1-MSB bit of message/image in the LSB position

of 1st pixel, and next 2-MSB bit in the LSB position of next
pixel, ….and so on until all 8-bits of first ASCII value of
the message/watermark is placed in the successive 8-
pixels LSB’s positions.

c) Read the next ASCII value in the message/watermark and

repeat steps (a) and (b)

d) Repeat all the above steps until all the ASCII values are
covered in the given message/watermark file

When all the above steps are finished we can obtained the
watermarked image, we can’t find the difference between
original image (Un-watermarked image) and watermarked image.

3.2 Results:
(a) Images with copy right information hidden in it shown below
along with it original image

9
 Original Image Watermarked Image
Message Hidden:- This property is copy righted to Mr. RAO’s company, illegal use of
this photograph in any manner is considered to be a crime…..!

10
 Original Image Watermarked Image
Message Hidden:- This property is copy righted to Mr. RAO’s company, illegal use of
this photograph in any manner is considered to be a crime…..!

(B) The images watermarked with a logo image are shown

below

11
 LOGO Image

Original Image Watermarked Image with Logo

3.3 Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:
(i) It is simple than all other time domain methods
(ii) It can also be used for authentication purpose
(iii) It can also be used for integrity checking
(iv) It can also run efficiently on small processors

Disadvantages:

12
 (i) If all LSB’s are set to zero in the Image file we can’t
prove copy rights hence it is simple to erase the
watermark from object being protected.

(ii) If a attacker modifies some important content of

image and then sets the all LSB’s of image pixels to
zero, it can’t detect the integrity of the content,
authenticity also not clear in this type of attack.

3.4 Further extensions

(i) The message/watermark i.e the copy rights can be can

be encrypted using cryptographic algorithms and then it
can be placed in LSB’s of image pixels, this provides a
greater security to the watermark stored in the image.

(ii) Rather than starting the insertions of message bits from

first pixel onwards in the image file, start the insertion
from any pixel in the image file. Here the starting
position of pixel in the image file is kept as secrete.

(iii) You can also use any random number generator

algorithm and insert the bits in the LSB of pixels as pixel
position is given by random number generator in the
image file. The algorithm should be kept as secrete here.

13
 REFERENCES

1) R.L Lagendijk, G.C. Langelaar, and I. Setyawan,

“Watermarking digital image and video data,” IEEE Signal
Processing Mag., Vol. 17, pp. 20-46, Setp. 2000.

2) F.Hartung and M.Kutter, “Multimedia water marking

techniques”, Proc. IEEE, vol.87, pp 1079-1107, July 2004

3) M.Yeung and F.Mintzer, “An invisible watermarking

technique for image verification,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf.
Image Processing, Santa Barbara, CA, Oct. 2002, pp 680-
683.

4) P.W. Wong, “A public key watermark for image verification

and authentication”, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Image
Processing, Chicago, II, October 4-7, 2001, pp 425-429.

5) J.fridrichm M.Goljan, and A.C. Baldoza, “New fragile

authentication watermark for images, “in Proc. IEEE Int.
Conf. Image Processing, Vancouver, BC, Cannada, Sept. 10-
13, 2000.

14

i . ex e