Digital Watermarking

Aimé Serge Nguimjeu Nguépi

Fachgebiet Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, Fachbereich Informatik, TU-Darmstadt,

Deutschland
nguimjeu@yahoo.fr

Abstract. The use of digital formatted data offers several advantages over
analog media such as high quality, easy editing, or high fidelity copying. The
development of multimedia services and environments and thus the ease by
which digital media can be duplicated and distributed, requires new concept to
support the protection of the media during the production and the distribution.
In this work I intend to disseminate the general concept of digital
watermarking. I will present the properties of a digital watermark and a
description of methods used to insert watermarks in media. Briefly some
application fields will be exposed and also an overview of methods which can
be used to break digital watermarking protection will be included.

Introduction

Unlike analog media that are becoming obsolete by now, digital media can be
stored, duplicated, and distributed easily and with no lost of fidelity. It is clear that
documents in digital form present a lot of advantages, but they also create problems,
for parties who wish to prevent unauthorized reproduction and distribution of valuable
digital medium (copyrighted, commercial, sensitive, secret documents…).
Encryptions technologies can be used to prevent unauthorized access to the digital
document - protect the content during the transmission of the file, but once it is
received and decrypted, the document is no longer protected and is in clear. As a
complement to encryption and/or copy protection, digital watermarking has been
proposed as “last line of defense” against document misuse.
Digital watermarking describes the process of embedding additional information
into a digital media, without compromising the media’s value. Hiding this piece of
information to anybody besides a special designed detector is achieved by using a
special watermarking technique called steganography. The watermark is then hidden
in such a way that it may be imperceptible to a human observer, but easily detected by
a computer.
The development of watermarking methods involves several design tradeoffs due
to the properties that a digital watermark should fulfill, and depending on the
application field. The requirements and the design constraints will be discussed more
throughout this paper.
2 Aimé Serge Nguimjeu Nguépi

1 Digital Watermarking – History & Terminology

1.1 History

More than 700 years ago, watermarks were used in Italy to indicate the paper brand
and the mill that produced it. By the 18th century watermarks began to be used as
anti-counterfeiting measures on money and other documents. The term watermark
was introduced near the end of the 18th century. It was probably given because the
marks resemble the effects of water on paper. The first example of a technology
similar to digital watermarking is a patent filed in 1954 by Emil Hembrooke for
identifying music works. In 1988, Komatsu and Tominaga appear to be the first to use
the term “digital watermarking”. About 1995, interest in digital watermarking began
to mushroom [21].

1.2 Terminology

Because most of the techniques used to hide or embed data in media share similar
principle and basic ideas, this section will give you some definitions, to avoid
confusion, to clarify and make the difference between these different techniques.
Steganography stands for the art, science, study, work of communicating in a way
which hides a secret message in the main information. Steganography methods rely
generally on the assumption that the existence of the covert data is unknown to
unauthorized parties and are mainly used in secret point-to-point communication
between trusting parties. In general the hidden data does not resist manipulation and
thus cannot be recovered.
Watermarking, as opposed to steganography – in an ideal world can resists to
attacks. Thus, even if the existence of the hidden information is known, it should be
difficult for an attacker to remove the embedded watermark, even if the algorithmic
principle is known.
Data hiding & Data embedding are used in varying context, but they do typically
denote either steganography or applications “between” steganography and
watermarking; applications where the existence of the embedded data are publicly
known, but do not need to be protected.
Copy protection attempts to find ways, which limits the access to copyrighted
material and/or inhibit the copy process itself.
Copyright protection inserts copyright information into the digital object without
the loss of quality. Whenever the copyright of a digital object is in question, this
information is extracted to identify the rightful owner. It is also possible to encode the
identity of the original buyer along with the identity of the copyright holder, which
allows tracing of any unauthorized copies.
 Digital Watermarking 3

2 Digital Watermarking – Applications

Very frequently there is a need to insert some additional information within a

document in digital form, such as music, text file, video or image. For example, a
copyright notice may need to be inserted in a software code in order to identify a legal
owner of that software. Since the digital watermark is in an ideal case inseparable
from the content, digital watermarking seems to be suitable method for associating
additional information. There are numerous watermarking application scenarios. The
following table gives a classification based on the nature of the information contained
in the watermark.

Table-1: A classification of digital watermarking application.

Application Class Purpose of the Application Scenarios

embedded watermark

Protection of Convey information - Copyright Protection

Intellectual Property about the content - Copy Protection
Rights ownership and - Fingerprinting
intellectual property - Signature
rights

Content Verification Ensures that the - Authentification

original digital - Integrity Checking
document has not
been altered, and/or
helps determine the
type of alteration

Information Hiding Represents side- - Broadcast Monitoring

channel used to carry - System
additional information - Enhancement

In the following I will provide a detailed explanation of possible application scenarios

involving watermarking.

2.1 Signatures

The watermark identifies the owner of the content. This information can be used by
a potential user to obtain legal rights to copy or publish the document from the contact
owner. It might also be used to help settle ownership disputes [1].
4 Aimé Serge Nguimjeu Nguépi

2.2 Fingerprinting

Example: Let us consider what happens in a software company. During the

development of software, the release candidates are usually distributed, according to
the release date to a number of people involved in the software development activity
(for testing purpose for example). Those distribution are mostly confidential, and for
internal use only. If a release is leaked out, the company would like to be able to
identify the source of the leak. The problem of identifying the leak can be solved by
distributing uniquely marked copies of the software to each recipient; it is called
fingerprinting. Since a digital watermark is inseparable from the content and further
more can be inserted so that it is invisible it is an appropriate solution for
fingerprinting.

2.3 Broadcast & Internet Monitoring

Digital watermarks enable content owners and distributors to track traditional

broadcast and Internet dissemination of their content. Content is embedded with a
unique identifier, and optionally, distributor and/or date and time information.
Detectors are placed in major markets, where broadcasts are received and processed.
The digital watermark is decoded and used to reference a database, resulting in
reports to the owner or distributor that the content has been played in the given
market, at a given time, and whether it played to full-length. The value is providing
usage and license compliance information, advertising clearance verification, and
detection of unauthorized use. A related database links the content identification to
the content owner, and the distributor identification to the content aggregator or
service provider for broadcast video, as well as distributor or retailer for recorded
media. Broadcast monitoring is applicable to web radio and web TV, and will be
applicable to multicast streams. [www.digimarc.com]

2.4 Authentification & Integrity

The figure [23] below illustrates an example with pictures modifications on a given
document. On the left there is the original picture of the car protected using digital
watermark. In the center a modified image obtained by swapping the number 9 and 4
of the license plate. Watermarking technology allows the detection and highlighting
of tampered areas, as shown on the right.
 Digital Watermarking 5

Figure-1: Digital watermark used for integrity verification.

Digital watermarks can verify that content is genuine and from an authorized
source, as well as verify that the content has not been altered or falsified. The
presence of the digital watermark and/or the continuity of the watermark can help
ensure that the content has not been altered.
In this case, the watermark must be design in a way that any alteration of the
content lead to the destruction of the watermark or creates a mismatch between the
content and the watermark that can be easily detected. This type of watermark is
sometimes called vapormark.

2.5 Copy & Copyright Protection

The objective of a copy protection application is to control access to and prevent

illegal copying of copyrighted document. Digital watermarks enable a means to
embed information about the rules of usage and copying of a given digital document.
These control instructions – generally simple ones – might indicate that access is
allowed, that a single copy can be made, or that no copies may be made.
Digital watermarks enable copyright holders to communicate their ownership to a
document and offer links to copyright and purchase information, thus requiring high
level of robustness. Note that robustness is not sufficient in this application field. If
for example different watermarks are embedded in the same document, it must be still
possible to identify the first watermark.

2.6 Covert Communication

One of the earliest applications of watermarking is a method of sending secret

messages. The application has been formulated by Simmons [3] as the “prisoner’s
problem”, in which we imagine two prisoners in separate cells trying to exchange
messages. Their problem is that they cannot pass messages directly, but rather, must
rely on the person of the warden to act as a messenger. The warden is willing to carry
only innocuous messages between them. Since their messages relate to a plan for
escape, it is in their best interest to find a way to disguise the escape-plan message in
them innocuous messages.
6 Aimé Serge Nguimjeu Nguépi

3 Digital Watermarking – Framework

Watermarking is the process that embeds data called watermark into a media such
that watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the
media. For example, a very simple yet widely used digital watermarking technique
would be – for images – to add a visible seal on top of an existing image.

Watermark
information w Encoder

Original
document (audio, Watermark
video, picture…) inserter
So

Watermarked
document Sw

Detected
Watermark Decoder watermark
detector W’

Human perceptual Perceived

System (eyes, etc…) media So’

Figure-3: Generic digital watermarking insertion & recovery.

Figure 3 illustrates the basic principle behind watermarking. Watermarking is

viewed as a process of combining two pieces of information in such a way that they
can be independently detected by two very different detection processes. One piece of
information is the media data So, which will be viewed (detected) by a human
observer. The other piece of information is a watermark, which will be detected by a
specially designed watermark detector.
The first step is to encode the watermark into a form that will be easily inserted
with the media. The watermark inserter then combines the encoded representation of
the watermark with the document. If the watermarking insertion process is design
correctly, the result is media that appears identical to the original when perceived by a
human, but which yields the encoded watermark information when processes by a
watermark detector.
 Digital Watermarking 7

3.1 Some Watermarking Methods

I will provide in this section a review of watermarking methods. This is unlikely to be

a complete list and omission should not be considered as being inferior to those listed
here.
The LSB technique is the simplest technique of watermark insertion. The LSB
watermarking method is very simple and effective, but lacks some properties that may
be vital for certain applications. Section 4 discusses the properties that a digital
watermark should fulfill.
Several authors [9, 10, 11] draw upon work in spread spectrum communication. It
is a method of embedding a watermark (a narrow-band signal), by spreading each bit
of the watermark over several samples of the host media, a wide-band signal. The
security resides in the secrecy of the spreading function.
This watermarking method is robust to small amount of noise introduced in the
digital document (picture, video, audio…). It can also accommodate multiple digital
watermarks. However, the mark is not robust against sophisticated images processing
attacks.
Bender et al [12] described Patchwork as possible watermarking method. This
technique encodes the watermark by modifying a statistical property of the image.
The authors note that the difference between any pair of randomly chosen pixels is
Gaussian distributed with a mean of zero. This mean can be shifted by selecting pairs
of points and incrementing the intensity of one of the points while decrementing the
intensity of the other. The resulting watermark spectrum is predominantly high
frequency.

4 Digital Watermarking – Requirements

There are a number of important characteristics that a watermark can exhibit.

These include that the watermark is difficult to notice, survives common distortion,
resists malicious attacks, carry many bits of information, can coexist with other
watermarks, and requires little computation to insert or detect. The importance of
these characteristics depends on the application.

4.1 Fidelity (Imperceptibility)

The watermark should not be noticeable to the viewer nor should the watermark
degrade the quality of the content. The term “imperceptible” is widely used in this
case. However, if a signal is truly imperceptible, then perceptually based lossy
compression algorithms either introduce further modifications that jointly exceed the
visibility threshold or remove such a signal. It is then important to develop techniques
that can be used to add imperceptible or unnoticeable watermark signals in
perceptually significant regions to counter the effects of signal processing.

4.2 Robustness
In general a digital watermark must be robust to transformations that include
common signal distortions as well as Digital - Analog/Analog - Digital conversion
8 Aimé Serge Nguimjeu Nguépi

and - as mentioned above – lossy compression, unless the media is altered to the point
of no value
There are two major problems when trying to guaranty robustness; the watermark
must be still present in the media after the transformation or it must be still possible
for the watermark detector to detect it.
When a signal is distorted, its fidelity is only preserved if its perceptually
significant regions remain intact, while perceptually insignificant regions might be
drastically changed with little effect on fidelity. Based on this argumentation, Cox et
al [7, 8] support the fact that the inserting watermark signal in perceptually significant
region of the media is the best way to achieve robustness.

4.3 Fragility
Some application fields require exactly the opposite of robustness. We consider for
example, the use of paper watermarks in bank notes. The point of these watermarks is
that they do not survive any kind of copying, and therefore can be use to indicate the
bill’s authenticity. In some application, the watermark is required to survive certain
transformations and be destroyed by others and that makes the design of fragile
watermarking difficult.

4.4 Modification & Multiple Watermarks

Changing a watermark can be accomplished by either removing the first watermark
or then adding a new one, or Inserting a second watermark.
The first alternative goes against the principle of tamper resistance, because it
implies that a watermark is easily removable. Allowing multiple watermarks to co-
exist is the preferred solution. There is however security problem related to the use of
multiple watermarks [2].

5 Digital Watermarking – Examples

This section presents digital watermarking methods for text images and video.
These medium differ in ways that present unique problems for watermarking. Still the
principle of watermarking remains the same [figure-3].
Image: [5, 6, 7, 20] Watermarks for natural images typically modify pixel
intensities or transform coefficients, although it is conceivable that a watermark could
alter other features such as edges or textures.
An image may be subject to a great deal of manipulation such as filtering,
cropping, geometric transformations, compression and compositing with other images
and hostile attacks. Thus imperceptibility, robustness are usually the most important
properties of image watermarks. Also since many images are compressed (JPEG,
GIF) watermarking algorithms that operate in the transform or wavelet domain may
be useful. One potential difficulty in image watermarking is the finite bandwidth
available. As the image size decreases, the permissible message length decreases.
Audio: There are several ways to embed watermark a music file [4]. The technique
to use depends on different criteria, like imperceptibility, watermark bit rate,
robustness, security, and computational cost. One heavy criterion may for example be
 Digital Watermarking 9

the need to keep the watermark even after a certain number of re-encoding or even
digital-analog-digital transfer processes.
Audio watermarking uses the time and frequency masking properties of the human
ear to conceal the watermark, and make it inaudible. One of the techniques is echo-
hiding which involves hiding information within recorded sound by introducing very
short echoes, relying on the fact that the human auditory system cannot perceive
echoes shorter than a few milliseconds. Information is embedded into audio data by
introducing two types of echoes, characterized by their duration and relative
amplitude. This allows us to encode ones and zeros within the audio data.
Digital video is a sequence of still images, and many image watermarking
techniques can be extended to video in a straightforward manner. In contrast to single
images, the large video bandwidth means that long messages can be embedded in
video. Speed is also an important issue because of the huge amounts of data that must
be processed. Digital video is typically stored and distributed in compressed form e.g.
MPEG. Hence, it is often desired that the marked compressed video should not
require more bandwidth than the unmarked compressed video.
Video watermarking poses some unique requirements beyond those for still image
compression because of the additional attacks that video are subject to: frame
shuffling, inter-frame collusion, etc. For instance, it is important not to watermark
each frame of a video as an independent image. If a different watermark is used for
each frame, an attacker can compare frames that change very little within a scene.
Simple collusion between these frames can remove a large part of the watermark.
Also, the computational effort needed to test each frame in real time would be large.
Using the same watermark for each frame also poses problems, since an attacker
could then collude with frames from completely different scenes.
Text Document: Raw texts are indeed very difficult watermark because of the
difficulty to define perceptual headroom in which to embed hidden information. [22]
In his work Helge Hoehn presents a watermarking method for document such as
ASCII text file or computer source code. On the other side final versions of text
documents are typically formatted (PostScript, PDF, and RTF) and it is possible to
hide a watermark in the layout information e.g. word and line spacing and formatting.
Although optical character recognition OCR can theoretically remove any layout
information OCR is expensive imperfect and often requires manual supervision.
Brassil et al [16] have investigated text watermarking and proposed a variety of
methods for embedding hidden messages in PostScript documents.

6 Digital Watermarking – Attacks

Attacks on digital watermarking [17] can be classified in two types: those related
to the signal and cryptographic attacks.
Attacks on Signal: The majority of the attacks are related to the watermark signal
itself [13]. They intend to remove the mark, or somehow mask it. These techniques
can rely on the structure of the embedding algorithm to know where and how the
watermark was incrusted. General attacks combine geometrical deformations,
rotation, D/A transformation and lossy compression on the marked signal. The
10 Aimé Serge Nguimjeu Nguépi

prominent software for attacks on digital watermark is StirMark; developed at

Cambridge and maintained by Fabien Petitcolas [14].
Cryptolographics Attacks: Some attacks try not to access the watermark, but to
modify its interpretation. The mosaic attack [14] belongs to this register. This is quite
general applicability and possesses the initially remarkable property that a marked
image for example can be unmarked and yet still rendered pixel for pixel in exactly
the same way as the marked image by a standard browser.

Conclusion

In this paper the reader could find some word about the origin of digital
watermarking and an introductory explanation of some of the terms commonly used.
We’ve covered then some application fields of digital watermarking and outlined
several characteristic that digital watermark should fulfill. We also spent some words
about the implementation of digital watermarking technique on specific digital
document. Despite the vulnerability of current techniques, watermarking remains
important as long as it hinders the task of copyright infringement, and current tools
offer this to a limited degree. Digital watermarking is an as yet unproven technology
which, though in its infancy, is set to grow, making a large impact on the way in
which digital media is distributed.

References

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