DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING

SYNOPSIS OF THE THESIS SUBMITTED IN FULFILMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

BY

VIKAS SAXENA
UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF
Prof. J. P. GUPTA

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

JAYPEE INSTITUE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY
A-10, SECTOR-62, NOIDA, INDIA
AUGUST-2008

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 ABSTRACT

One of the biggest technological events of the last two decades was the

invasion of digital media in an entire range of everyday life aspects. Digital

data can be stored efficiently and with a very high quality, and it can be

manipulated very easily using computers. Furthermore, digital data can be

transmitted in a fast and inexpensive way through data communication

networks without losing quality. Digital media offer several distinct

advantages over analog media. The quality of digital audio, images and video

signals are better than that of their analog counterparts. Editing is easy

because one can access the exact discrete locations that need to be changed.

Copying is simple with no loss of fidelity and a copy of a digital media is

identical to the original. With digital multimedia distribution over World

Wide Web, Intellectual Property Right (IPR) are more threatened than ever

due to the possibility of unlimited copying [1-4]. One solution would be to

restrict access to the data using some encryption technique. However

encryption does not provide overall protection. Once the encrypted data are

decrypted, they can be freely distributed or manipulated. The above problem

can be solved by hiding some ownership data into the multimedia data, which

can be extracted later to prove the ownership. This idea is implemented in

bank currency notes. In bank currency notes, a watermark is embedded which

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is used to check the originality of the note. The same “watermarking”

concept may be used in multimedia digital contents for checking the

authenticity of the original content. So, A Watermarking is adding an

“ownership” information in multimedia contents to prove the authenticity.

This technology embeds a data, an unperceivable digital code, namely the

watermark, carrying information about the copyright status of the work to be

protected. Continuous efforts are being made to device an efficient

watermarking schema but techniques proposed so far do not seem to be robust

to all possible attacks and multimedia data processing operations.

Considering the enormous financial implications of copyright protection, there

is a need to establish a globally accepted watermarking technique. The

sudden increase in watermarking interest is most likely due to the increase in

concern over IPR. Today, digital data security covers such topics as access

control, authentication, and copyright protection for still images, audio, video,

and multimedia products. A pirate tries either to remove a watermark to

violate a copyright or to cast the same watermark, after altering the data, to

forge the proof of authenticity. Generally, the watermarking of still image,

video, and audio demonstrate certain common fundamental concepts.

Numerous watermarking applications reported in the literature depend on the

services we wish to support. Thus watermarking techniques may be relevant

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in various application areas including Copyright protection, Copy protection,

Temper detection, Fingerprinting etc [5-7].

Based on their embedding domain, watermarking schemes can be

classified either as Spatial Domain (The watermarking system directly alters

the main data elements, like pixels in an image, to hide the watermark data) or

Transformed Domain (the watermarking system alters the frequency

transforms of data elements to hide the watermark data). The latter has proved

to be more robust than the spatial domain watermarking [5], [9].

To transfer an image to its frequency representation, one can use

several reversible transforms like Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete

Wavelet Transform (DWT), or Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) [1]. Each of

these transforms has its own characteristics and represents the image in

different ways. Watermarks can be embedded within images by modifying

these values, i.e. the transform domain coefficients. In case of spatial domain,

simple watermarks could be embedded in the images by modifying the pixel

values or the least significant bit (LSB) values. However, more robust

watermarks could be embedded in the transform domain of images by

modifying the transform domain coefficients. In 1997 Cox et.al presented a

paper “Secure Spread Spectrum Watermarking for Multimedia” [9], one of the

most cited paper (cited 2985 times till April’ 2008 as per Google Scholar

search), and after that most of the research efforts are based on this work.

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Even though spatial domain based techniques can not sustain most of the

common attacks like compression, high pass or low pass filtering etc.,

researchers present spatial domain based techniques too [5], [9].

Since, financial implications of some of the application areas like

fingerprinting and copyright protection are very high and till now no

successful algorithm seem to be available to prevent illegal copying of the

multimedia contents, the primary goal of this thesis work is chosen to develop

watermarking schemes for images (which are stored in spatial domain as well

as transformed domain) which can sustain the known attacks and various

image manipulation operations. This thesis resolves the following issues:

ISSUE 1: Till now there in no “Generic” nature in the watermarking

algorithms available. More precisely, if certain approach is applicable for a

gray level image, the same approach does not work for the other formats of an

image.

ISSUE 2: Even if gray color image watermarking algorithms are extended for

RGB color images, the maximum work has been done for BLUE color channel

only because human eyes are less sensitive to detect the changes in BLUE

color channel. No attack impact analysis, i.e, which color channel may be

affected by a particular attack, has been carried out [11-13].

Therefore, apart from choosing digital Image Watermarking as a major

problem, we have chosen to identify the suitability of a color channel with

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respect to attack (if any) for multi-color channel images (True color windows

BMP, uncompressed JPEG). We also decided to explore the ways such that

attack impacts may be minimized before the watermark embedding process.

ISSUE 3: In most of the research papers, once the watermarking scheme is

finalized, it is applied to all test images. Since each image is different and has

certain characteristics and after embedding the watermark data by a particular

watermarking scheme, its performance against a particular attack may not be

similar with other image. No study is conducted to make the embedding

scheme based on some image characteristics.

Therefore we have decided to explore the relationship between the

performance of watermarking scheme and the cover image characteristics

itself.

ISSUE 4: Mostly watermarking schemes are developed in a way that first a

scheme is developed based on the extension of earlier presented one and then

check its performance against the common image manipulations and known

attacks. There are huge financial implications of watermarking schemes (say

fingerprinting), but no scheme has been developed, which is, by design,

resistant to at least one attack, to ensure that, a particular attack (having most

financial issues) cannot be conducted by an attacker.

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 Therefore we decided to design watermarking schemes such that an

inherent nature in can be embedded to guarantee that at least one serious attack

having most financial implications cannot be conducted on watermarked

images.

If owner identification applications place the same watermark in all copies

of the same content, then it may create a problem. If out of n number of legal

buyer of content, one starts to sell the contents illegally, it may be very difficult to

know who is redistributing the contents without permission. Allowing each copy

distributed to be customized for each legal recipient can solve this problem. This

capability allows a unique watermark to be embedded in each individual copy.

Now if owner finds an illegal copy, he/she can find out who is selling his contents

by finding the watermark, which uniquely belongs to a singly legal buyer. This

particular application area is known as fingerprinting and thus has numerous

financial implications. The most serious attack for fingerprinting is the “collusion

attack”. If attacker has access to more than one copy of watermarked image,

he/she can predict/ remove the watermark data by colluding them.

Researchers working on “fingerprinting” primarily focus on the “collusion

attack”[14-16].

So, while designing a watermark scheme, we decided that our proposed

schemes must be designed in such a way that schemes are inherently collusion

attack resistant. Therefore this thesis presents a new term “ICAR (Inherently

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Collusion Attack Resistant)” as a requirement for a watermarking system. The

other 3 issues are taken into account while developing the watermarking

schemes.

The first chapter is devoted to the introduction of the watermarking

area. Data hiding background is represented and the related terminologies are

explained. Then various application areas of watermarking are represented

and what may the key requirements of a successful watermarking system are

discussed. Since watermarking can be classified on various parameters, the

various types of watermarking are represented based on different

classifications. The chapter-wise organization of the thesis is described.

The purpose of chapter-2 is to provide an overview of the existing

watermarking techniques and related emerging issues [1-6] and then problem

statement formulation based on the current demand of the technology.

In this chapter, apart from giving more emphasis only to those papers,

which are related to this thesis work, care has been taken to cover more and

more upcoming concepts. After then the shortcomings and the opportunities

for the research work are identified and based on those the research issues are

developed by giving proper justifications.

Chapter 3 describes the concepts like JPEG compression, which are the

preliminaries requirements. We are using Peak Signal to Noise ratio (PSNR)

and Correlation coefficient (CC) to measure the quality of the watermarked

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images and the extracted watermark logo, which are also described in this

chapter. Finally the test images (both stored in spatial and transformed

domain, gray and full colored) used in this thesis are given.

Our research work description starts from chapter 4. This chapter deals

the watermarking of the gray images. To start with, initially we focus how we

can increase the robustness of the well-known DCT and DWT [17-18] based

watermarking algorithms against some specific attacks. We present a new

concept of “preprocessing” to increase the PSNR value of extracted logo from

watermarked image if watermarked image has been attacked by JPEG

compression attack. Preprocessing steps change or modify the original image

such that, the affect after the attack on the watermarked image could be

minimized. We tried to accomplish this by creating the same effect in an

image, before watermarking it, which this image shall have, after it has been

attacked. It is found that preprocessing steps increase the robustness of the

watermarking scheme [19]. Since DCT based schemes are robust against

those attacks, which do not alter the perceptual quality of the image, we tested

the proposed concept in the case of such attack, which has serious impact on

the perceptual quality of the image. Therefore, we have extended the same

hypothesis to increase the robustness against “Histogram equalization” attack,

which attacks on perceptual quality of the image. Our results favor the

proposed hypothesis and show the importance of the attack impact analysis to

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increase the performance of the watermarking algorithms [20]. After this, a

watermarking scheme for gray level images is developed which is ICAR in

nature as well as very robust against common image manipulation and attack

(specially JPEG compression attack). The proposed scheme is developed over

the classical middle-band coefficient exchange scheme to inherit its robustness

against JPEG compression because this scheme takes the advantage of Human

Visual System (HVS). We achieve ICAR nature using randomness and

redundancy in coefficient exchange criterion. Apart from this, coefficient

exchange criterion is develop to be dependent on low frequency coefficients to

provide extra robustness because we know that any kind of attack or image

manipulation can not alter the low frequency coefficients as this will have a

serious impact on the image quality. Results indicate that, this scheme is, not

only collusion attack resistant and resistant to common image manipulations

and attacks, but more robust against JPEG compression attack as compared to

other similar, state-of-art, watermarking schemes [21].

Chapter-5 deals with the watermarking of colored images. Colored

images contain three color channel (red, green and blue), and human eyes are

least sensitive to detect the changes in blue color channel and therefore most

of the research work is based on hiding the watermark data in blue color

channel. We propose that the suitability of the color channel is also dependent

on the attack, the watermarked images have to undergo. For this we use 4 test

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images in Window’s 24-bit image format and analyze the robustness against

JPEG compression attack by hiding the watermark data in all color channels.

Results indicate that there is a strong connection between the color channel

selection and the robustness against certain attack. It is found that for DCT

based watermarking scheme, if we hide the watermark data in green channel,

the robustness against the JPEG compression increases. The idea of

preprocessing (proposed in previous chapter for gray level images) is also

verified for color images [22]. We then developed an ICAR watermarking

scheme for colored images also, based on the scheme developed in chapter-4.

We discovered that even after some serious attacks, one cannot change the

average of all middle band coefficients of 8x8 DCT. We used this fact in

hiding the watermark data. Again, being an ICAR scheme, this scheme is

collusion attack resistant as well as very robust to common image

manipulation. We have tested test images against uniform scaling, brightness

adjustment, Gaussion blurring, Hue and saturation along with malicious attack

like histogram equalization and adding Gaussion noise. The proposed

watermarking scheme sustains all attacks [23]. In case of performance against

JPEG compression, proposed scheme outperforms other similar watermarking

schemes by giving very good results even at JPEG quality factor Q=5

(Compression ratio 98% and more), whereas other state-of-art watermarking

schemes start loosing its robustness below the JPEG quality factor Q=20.

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 Chapter-6 describes the watermarking of JPEG image. Since, most of

the images present on World Wide Web are in JPEG format, which is a highly

compressed image format and stores the images in the transformed domain, we

developed an ICAR watermarking scheme for JPEG images also.

Since JPEG is a very high compressed format, we know that while

processing and storing a JPEG image, lot of its coefficients will change their

values and thus recovery of the watermark data is difficult if only the relative

strengths of coefficients of middle band regions are considered. Therefore, we

provide extra robustness (by involving some coefficients whose values don’t

changes much) by incorporating the large value at the top-left corner, the DC

coefficient in 8x8 block DCT. This DC coefficient is the major dominating

value while decompressing. This DC value alone can regenerate a very good

approximated image by taking the IDCT. If this value is altered, the image is

largely affected. We hide the watermark data based on DC coefficient.

Proposed scheme is not only an ICAR scheme, but also enhances the

performance. Results indicated that, the proposed scheme recovers the

watermark even from highly attacked images which are compressed up to

quality factor Q=5 of JPEG. In addition to this, the proposed scheme is

resisting common image manipulations like cropping, scaling, flipping,

histogram equalization, brightness- contrast adjustment, Hue-saturation

alteration and Gaussion noise [24]. In this chapter, we also explore a

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relationship between the robustness and some image characteristics. We

experiment the standard deviation of an image and related this measure with

the performance of the watermarking scheme [25].

After successfully developing the ICAR watermarking schemes for

gray, colored BMP image and JPEG images using DCT, we explored the

DWT. The basic need behind this is the upcoming JPEG2000 format. This

image format stores the image using wavelet transform. Any of the image

watermarked using our proposed algorithm may have to undergo JPEG2000

format conversion also, therefore to make the watermark embedding liner to

the possible attack, we decided to use the DWT as embedding domain. A

DWT based watermarking scheme may not sustain those attacks which a DCT

based scheme can sustain very well (like JPEG compression), therefore we

used the idea of Dual Watermarking, ie embedding the watermark using both

DWT and DCT to increase to number of possible attacks which our

watermarking scheme could sustain. Like our earlier proposed watermarking

schemes, apart from ICAR in nature, the proposed DWT based watermarking

scheme is very robust against .jp2 conversion attack (JPEG2000 format),

JPEG compression, and other common image manipulations and attacks [26].

In Chapter-7, summary of the results and goal achieved, are given in

detail. Future work of research work is also discussed. In the end, a list of all

publications referred is given.

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 Keywords: Intellectual Property Right, Digital Image

Watermarking, Collusion attack, Discrete Cosine Transform, Discrete

Wavelet Transform, Haar wavelet, JPEG image encoding, Peak Signal

to Noise Ratio, Correlation coefficient, JPEG2000 image encoding.

References:

[1] Potdar, Vidysagar and Han, Song and Chang, Elizabeth, “A survey of digital image
watermarking techniques”, Proceeding of 3rd IEEE-International Conference on Industrial
Informatics, Frontier Technologies for the Future of Industry and Business, pp. 709-716, Perth,
WA, Aug 10, 2005.

[2] Christian Rey, Jean-Luc Dugelay, “A Survey of Watermarking Algorithms for Image
Authentication”, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
Volume 2002 (2002), Issue 6, Pages 613-621.

[3] Langelaar, G.C. Setyawan, I. Lagendijk, R.L. , “ Watermarking digital image and video
data:A state-of-the-artoverview”, Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE,
Sep 2000, Volume 17, Issue 5. pp: 20-46

[4] G. Voyatzis, N. Nikolaidis, and I. Pitas. Digital watermarking: an overview. In S. Theodoridis

et al., editors, Signal processing IX, theories and applications: proceedings of Eusipco-98, Ninth
European Signal Processing Conference, Rhodes, Greece, 8–11 September 1998, pages 9–12,
Patras, Greece, 1998. Typorama Editions.

[5] Saraju P. Mohanty , "Digital Watermarking: A Tutorial Review", URL:

http://www.csee.usf.edu/~smohanty/research/Reports/WMSurvey1999Mohanty.pdf
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mohanty99digital.htm

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[6] W. Bender, D. Gruhl, N. Morimoto, and A. Lu. "Techniques for data hiding". IBM Systems
Journal, Vol. 35.(3/4), 1996, pp. 313-336.

[7] M. Arnold, M. Schmucker, and S.D. Wolthusen, “Techniques and application of Digital
Watermarking and Content Protection”, Eds.Northwood ,Artech House, 2003.

[8] S. P. Mohanty, J. R. Ramakrishnan, and M. S. Kankanhalli, “A dual watermarking technique

for images,” in Proc. ACM, 1999, pp. 49-51

[9] I.J. Cox, J.Kilian, T.Leighton and T. Shamoon, “Secure Spread Spectrum watermarking for
Multimedia,” IEEE Tras. on Image Processing , Vol. 6,No12, 1997, pp. 1673-1687.

[10] Chun-Hsiang Huang Ja-Ling Wu , “Attacking visible watermarking schemes”, IEEE

Transactions on Multimedia, Feb 2004, Vol 6, Issue 1, pp: 16-30.

[11] F. Bossen M. Kutter, F. Jordan, “Digital signature of color images using amplihlde
modulation,” in Proc. of SPlE storage and retrieval for image and video databases, San lose,
USA, vol. 3022-5, February 1997, pp. 518-526.

[12] M. Barni, F. Bartolini, and A. Piva, “Multichannel watermarking of color images,” IEEE
Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol., vol. 12, pp. 142-156, Mar. 2002.

[13] M. Kutter and S. Winkler, “A vision-based masking model for spread-spectrum image
watermarking,” IEEE Trans. Image Processing, vol. 11, pp. 16-25, Jan. 2002.

[14] Network Technology research Center, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,

http://www.ntu.edu.sg/ntrc/research.htm

[15] W. Kim, S.H. Lee, H.-W. Jang, and J. Kim, “Multi-bits Fingerprinting for Image”
http://www.actapress.com/PaperInfo.aspx?PaperID=15683

[16] Collusion-resistant watermarking and fingerprinting, US Patent Issued on June 13, 2006
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7062653.html

[17] N. Johnson, ,and S. Katezenbeisser, “A Survey of Steganographic Techniques”,

Eds.Northwood, MA:ArtecHouse,43, 1999

[18] C. Shoemaker, “Hidden bits: A survey of techniques for digital

watermarking,” [Online]. Available: http://www.vu.union.edu/~shoemakc/
watermarking/watermarking.html

[19] Vikas Saxena, J.P. Gupta, “Towards Increasing the Robustness of Image Watermarking
Scheme Against JPEG Compression”, Proceeding of IAENG International Conference on
Imaging Engineering, Hong Kong, 21-23 March, 2007, pp 1903-1906, vol-2,ISBN: 978-988-
98671-7-1, publisher: Newswood Ltd.

[20] Vikas Saxena, J.P. Gupta, “Towards Increasing the Robustness of Image Watermarking
Scheme Against Histogram Equalization Attack” Proceedings of IEEE 15th Signal Processing
and Communication Applications Conference, 11-13 June 2007, Turkey
Refer:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?
isnumber=4298551&arnumber=4298829&count=322&index=277

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[21] Vikas Saxena, J.P. Gupta, “Collusion Attack Resistant Watermarking Scheme for Images
Using DCT”, Proceedings of IEEE 15th Signal Processing and Communication Applications
Conference, 11-13 June 2007, Turkey.
Refer:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp? isnumber=4298551&arnumber=4298813&
count=322&index=261

[22] Vikas Saxena et al., “Performance Analysis of Color Channel for DCT Based Image
Watermarking Scheme”, International Journal of Security and Its Applications. ISSN: 1738-9976,
Vol-1,Number-2,Oct 2007, pp-41-46. ISSN: 1975-4094.
Refer: http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJSIA/vol1_no2_2007.php

[23] Vikas Saxena, J.P. Gupta, “A Novel Collusion Attack Resistant Watermarking Scheme for
Color Images”, IAENG International Journal of Computer Science, Volume 34 Issue 2, Pages
171-177, December 2007, ISSN: 1819-656X.
Refer: http://www.iaeng.org/IJCS/issues_v34/issue_2/index.html

[24] Vikas Saxena, J.P.Gupta, " DCT based Scheme for JPEG Image Watermarking" accepted
for Vol. 2, Number 1, January 2008 Issue of “International Journal of Information Processing”.
Editor and reviewers comments received, (Now communicated to Elsevier).

[25] Gupta A, Saxena Vikas, Srivastava. M.C, Gupta J.P., “Towards Achieving the Higher
Compression of Images Using Standard JPEG Scheme", To appear in International Journal of
Tomography & Statistics, ISSN 0972-9976 (June 2008 issue), Editor and reviewers comments
received, (Accepted).

[26] Vikas Saxena, J.P. Gupta, “DWT-DCT based dual watermarking scheme for JPEG images”,
(Communicated to ACM-SIGGRAPH).

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