Watermarking with Wavelets: Simplicity Leads to Robustness
Evelyn Brannock Michael Weeks
Computer Science Department
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia, USA 30303
evelyn@cs.gsu.edu
Robert Harrison
Computer Science Department
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia, USA 30303
rharrison@cs.gsu.edu
Abstract
With ubiquitous computing comes the access of copy-
righted work across computing platforms. One may
have the same image (or video) on an iPod, as well
as a laptop and desktop computer. Safeguarding cre-
ative content and intellectual property in a digital form
has become increasingly difficult as technologies, such
as the Internet, broadband availability and mobile ac-
cess, advance. It has grown to be progressively easier to
copy, modify and redistribute digital media, resulting in
great declines in business profits. Digital watermarking
is a steganographic technique that has been proposed
as a possible solution to this problem. This paper exam-
ines a technique for digital watermarking which utilizes
properties of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT).
The digital watermarking algorithm uses a database of
multiple images with various properties. Eight fami-
lies of wavelets, both orthogonal and biorthogonal, are
compared for efficacy. To objectively measure the suc-
cess of the algorithm and the influence of the mother
wavelet, the PSNR for each wavelet family and image
is obtained. Noise is introduced to simulate various at-
tacks. Objective measures are used to determine the
performance of the algorithm. We find that the simpler
wavelet transforms, e.g. the Haar wavelet, outperform
the more complex ones.
978-1-4244-1884-8/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE 587
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Computer Science Department
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia, USA 30303
mweeks@ieee.org
1. Introduction
The protection of creative digital content poses a
difficult challenge to those who wish to retain control
of their work. Historically, U.S. copyright law has tried
to provide protection for this intellectual property. The
improvements in digital technologies continue to ease
and increase the ways in which consumers can inno-
cently use and enjoy creative content, for example, by
copying music files from a CD to store on a computer
or portable music device. However, many cases are
not so innocent and the media in digital form are flaw-
lessly and inexpensively reproduced in great volumes
and instantaneously distributed worldwide for more ne-
farious purposes such as digital piracy for profit. There-
fore, creators and owners of the work are concerned
that unauthorized copying and redistribution of their
copyrighted works will cause their economic returns to
decline. Consequently, the study of technological ap-
proaches to solve this problem has become increasingly
important and popular. One such approach is digital wa-
termarking. Watermarks serve to identify the source of
the content and thus aid in investigating abusive dupli-
cation.
The impact of the size and nature of the data on the
robustness of the embedded watermark will be investi-
gated, in an extension of [1]. An uncomplicated key will
be used. The size of the key will not have any effect on
the visibility of the watermark, but as in other crypto-
graphic systems, for commercial applications it should
be large enough to make extensive search attacks more
 difficult. All of the test images are grayscale.
In this paper, the next section will cover the back-
ground and digital watermarking principles, section 3
will cover wavelets, and then section 4 will discuss the
method used. Section 5 presents results, and section 6
concludes the paper.
2. Digital Watermarking
2.1. Definition
According to Hartung and Kutter, a digital water-
mark is “a digital code unremovably, robustly, and im-
perceptibly embedded in the host data and typically
contains information about origin, status, and/or des-
tination of the data” [2]. It is a form of steganogra-
phy, because it hides the embedded data, often without
the knowledge of the viewer or user. Since the purpose
of steganography is the secret communication between
two persons, the watermark can be considered to have
been successfully attacked if its existence is determined.
When contrasting with steganography, watermarks add
the property of robustness, which is the ability to with-
stand most common attacks [1]. Attacks usually include
two types: removing the watermark and rendering the
watermark undetectable [3]. Attack categorization may
include (but are not limited to) [3] [4] [5]:
• Adding noise such as Gaussian.
• Using linear filtering such as low-pass filtering.
• Compressing the image, such as JPEG does.
• Applying transforms such as translation, rotation
and scaling.
• Permuting the original signal by rerecording or
recapturing so that extracting the watermark is
nearly impossible.
Even though the rise in popularity as a research
topic does not appear to have begun until the early
1990’s, the watermark has a long and distinguished his-
tory. The oldest watermarked paper has been dated back
to the 13th century when papermaking artisans needed
to protect their provenance [6]. The analogy can be seen
to today’s watermarks; only the media is different.
2.2. Types and Applications
There are two main types of watermarks. A blind
(or public) watermark is invisible, and is extracted
“blindly” without knowledge of the original host im-
age or the watermark itself. The second is non-blind
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(also asymmetric marking or private), in which the wa-
termark is embedded in the original host, and is inten-
tionally visible to the human observer. The original data
is required for watermark extraction [1] [2]. The blind
watermark has many more applications than the visible
watermark. The subject of this paper is a blind water-
mark.
There are various watermarking applications for
images, as listed below [2] [5] [7].
• Copyright protection is probably the most com-
mon use of watermarks today. Copyright owner
information is embedded in the image in order to
prevent others from alleging ownership of the im-
age.
• The fingerprint embeds information about the le-
gal receiver in the image. This involves embedding
a different watermark into each distributed image
and allows the owner to locate and monitor pirated
images that are illegally obtained.
• Prevention of unauthorized copying is accom-
plished by embedding information about how of-
ten an image can be legally copied. An ironic ex-
ample in which the use of a watermark might have
prevented the wholesale pilfering of an image is in
the ubiquitous “Lena” image, which has been used
without the original owner’s permission.
• In an image authentication application the intent
is to detect modifications to the data. The charac-
teristics of the image, such as its edges, are em-
bedded and compared with the current images for
differences.
2.3. Requirements
Obviously, an implicit requirement for a blind wa-
termark is that it is invisible to the naked eye and should
look indistinguishable from the original. There are also
other requirements for successful watermarking tech-
niques. Literature lists the following common require-
ments: robustness, imperceptible to statistical methods,
recovery with or without the original data, extraction or
verification of a given watermark, security issues and
use of keys, speed, and capacity [1] [2] [4] [7].
How can each of these requirements be scored and
evaluated? The ideal would be to gather a large sam-
ple of people to view the original host image, the wa-
termark, the host image containing the embedded wa-
termark, and the extracted watermark under excellent
circumstances (good lighting, no distractions, etc.) be-
cause evaluation of the watermark involves the subjec-
tive judgment of the distortion introduced through the
 process. (In general, there is a trade-off between wa-
termark robustness, watermark perceptibility and water-
mark payload) [8]. However, since this was not possi-
ble for the paper, the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio was
utilized. The quality of an N × M host image ( f (x, y))
is compared to the image containing the watermark
(g(x, y)) using the formula,
max pixel value
PSNR(g, f ) = 20 × log10

∑x,y ( f (x,y)−g(x,y))
2
size
2.4. Watermarking Techniques
All watermarking methods share a watermark em-
bedding system and a watermark extraction system [1]
[2]. There are two main watermarking techniques avail-
able: spatial domain and frequency domain. The tech-
nique used in this paper will embed the watermark using
the Discrete Wavelet Transform, utilizing a frequency
domain method.
3. Wavelets
The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is cur-
rently used in a wide variety of signal processing ap-
plications, such as in audio and video compression, re-
moval of noise in audio, and the simulation of wireless
antenna distribution. Wavelets have their energy con-
centrated in time and are well suited for the analysis of
transient, time-varying signals. Since most of the real-
life signals encountered are time varying in nature, the
Wavelet Transform suits many applications very well
[9].
We use the DWT to implement a simple water-
marking scheme. The 2-D discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) decomposes the image into sub-images, 3 de-
tails and 1 approximation. The approximation looks just
like the original; only on 1/4 the scale.
The 2-D DWT is an application of the 1-D DWT
in both the horizontal and the vertical directions.
The DWT separates an image into a lower resolution
approximation image (LL) as well as horizontal (HL),
vertical (LH) and diagonal (HH) detail components.
The low-pass and high-pass filters of the wavelet
transform naturally break a signal into similar (low-
pass) and discontinuous/rapidly-changing (high-pass)
sub-signals. The slow changing aspects of a signal are
preserved in the channel with the low-pass filter and
the quickly changing parts are kept in the high-pass
filter’s channel. Therefore we can embed high energy
watermarks in the regions that human vision is less
sensitive to, such as the high resolution detail bands
(LH, HL, and HH). Embedding watermarks in these
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regions allow us to increase the robustness of our
watermark, at little to no additional impact on image
quality [10]. The fact that the DWT is a multi-scale
analysis can be used to the watermarking algorithm’s
benefit. Multi-resolution is the process of taking a
filter’s output and putting through another pair of
analysis filters. The first approximation will be used
as a “seed” image and recursively apply the DWT a
second and third time (or however many times it is
necessary to perform to find all of the areas of interest)
[9]. See [14] for more background on wavelets, and
[13] for wavelet history.
4. Implementation
A simple watermark raster bitmap image was em-
bedded in each of the images. It was created by cutting
and pasting the word “Watermark” from a Microsoft
Word document into Adobe Photoshop. This exhibits
the use of text, such as the owner’s name, as a water-
mark image.
Figure 1. Watermark bitmap embedded
There are numerous wavelets to choose from. Out
of the box, MATLAB offers a plethora of choices [11].
This paper focuses on the question: Is there a best se-
lection that can be made for an application? Since a
unique answer to this question was not discovered, eight
differing popular wavelets were used to implement for
comparison and contrast; the Haar wavelet, the or-
thogonal, 4-coefficient, Daubechies wavelet (e.g. db2),
the 32nd order Daubechies wavelet (e.g. db32), three
biorthogonal wavelets, including a reverse biorthogo-
nal wavelet (bior2.2, bior5.5, rbio6.8), the symlet 8-
coefficient wavelet and the 4th order coiflet wavelet.
4.1. Images Used
Varying sizes, complexity and types of images
were chosen. All images are grayscale. The image
database consists of:
• “Barbara” - 512 x 512 pixels
• “Boat” - 512 x 512 pixels [15]
• “Box” - 256 x 256 pixels
• “Cameraman” - 256 x 256 pixels (available at [15])
• “Cell” - 190 x 158 pixels
 • “Circuit” - 272 x 280 pixels
• “Dog on Porch” - 256 x 256 pixels [9]
• “Eight Coins” - 242 x 308 pixels
• “Filopodia” - 640 x 480 pixels (thanks to Dr. Vin-
cent Rehder at Georgia State University)
• “France” - 672 x 496 pixels (a converted Power-
Point slide [15])
• “Frog” - 620 x 498 pixels [15]
• “Gold Hill” - 512 x 512 pixels [15]
• “Lena” - 512 x 512 pixels
• “Mandrill” - 512 x 512 pixels (available at [15])
• “Moon” - 358 x 536 pixels
• “Mountain” - 640 x 580 pixels [15]
• “MRI” - 128 x 128 pixels
• “Peppers” - 512 x 512 pixels [15]
• “Pout” - 240 x 290 pixels
• “Zelda” - 512 x 512 pixels [15]
4.2. Algorithm
The 2-D DWT is applied to the image, giving four
quadrants 1/4 the size of the original image, and produc-
ing the two matrices of coefficients that will be manip-
ulated, the horizontal details (HL) and vertical details
(LH). A pseudo random noise pattern is generated us-
ing the secret key image as a seed, and each of the bits
of the watermark are embedded in the horizontal (HL)
and vertical (LH) coefficient sub-bands using this pat-
tern. The equation used to embed the watermark is:
Wi
= Wi + α Wi xi for all pixels in LH, HL
Wi
= Wi for all pixels in HH, LL[12]
Wi
is the watermarked image, Wi is the original image,
and α is a scaling factor. Increasing α increases the ro-
bustness of the watermark, but decreases the quality of
the watermarked image. We use the same α (the con-
stant 2 on a scale of 1 to 5) as used in [12]. Finally, we
write the image, and calculate the PSNR.
To extract the watermark, we apply the 2-D inverse
DWT to the possibly corrupted watermarked image Wi∗ .
The same secret key is used to seed the random function
and to generate the pseudo random noise pattern. The
correlation, z, between the pseudo random noise and the
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horizontal and vertical details is found, and if that corre-
lation exceeds a threshold (the mean of the correlation),
a pixel in the watermark is located. yi is a candidate
pixel of the watermark and M is the length of the water-
mark.
1
z= ∑ Wi∗ × yi [12]
M 1,M
Finally the extracted watermark is written and the
PSNR is calculated.
5. Results
The following images (figure 2 and 3) are the
results of the watermarking implementation in this
project. For brevity, the watermarked images have been
resized from their original size and not all of the re-
covered watermarks are pictured. Twenty pristine orig-
inal images, with eight wavelet families, and three types
of noise introduced results in 640 watermarked images
and 640 recovered watermarks. The watermarks in fig-
ure 2 are all from the Lena image, encoded from left to
right with the Haar wavelet, Daubechies-4 coefficient
wavelet, and the biorthogonal 2.2 wavelet. In figure
3, we see the recovered watermarks from the Frog im-
age [15], with Gaussian noise, and encoded from left
to right with the Haar wavelet, the biorthogonal 5.5,
and the symlet 8 coefficient wavelet. Clearly, the wa-
termarks encoded with the Haar wavelet were the best
ones recovered. These recovered watermarks are repre-
sentative; each image in the database had corresponding
visual results.
Figure 2. Watermark Images Recovered from
Lena: Haar, DB2, and Bior2.2
Figure 3. Watermark Images Recovered from
Frog (with Gaussian noise): Haar, Bior5.5, and
Symlets8
The five tables shown represent the statistics ob-
tained. The first table examines the watermark embed-
ding process, showing the average, minimum and max-
imum PSNRs. The second table shows, for the entire
image database, the average PSNR obtained for each
type of noise, including Gaussian, salt and pepper, and
 Table 1. Watermark Embedding Table 3. Sample Data for Watermark Extraction

Average Minimum Maximum Wavelet Image PSNR Image PSNR

Wavelet PSNR PSNR PSNR Haar Barbara 6.11 Frog 6.11
Haar 25.5674 25.1307 28.1656 Daubechies 5.82 5.81
Daubechies 23.2076 17.1497 26.3296 Daubechies 32 5.94 5.94
Daubechies 32 20.0191 20.8266 26.9422 Bior 2.2 6.02 6.04
Bior 2.2 23.5340 18.0592 27.8657 Bior 5.5 5.92 5.92
Bior 5.5 24.3510 19.0025 26.4089 Symlets 8 5.93 5.93
Symlets 8 23.7301 18.2345 26.5825 Coiflets 4 5.93 5.94
Coiflets 4 23.8802 18.5406 26.7399 Rev. Bior 6.8 5.94 5.95
Rev. Bior 6.8 23.7707 18.9390 26.5306 Haar Box 6.10 Lena 6.11
All 23.5075 17.1497 28.1656 Daubechies 5.87 5.80
Daubechies 32 5.94 5.94
Bior 2.2 5.98 6.03
Bior 5.5 5.93 5.92
Table 2. Watermark Embedding with Noise Symlets 8 5.93 5.93
Salt and Coiflets 4 5.93 5.94
Speckle Gaussian Pepper Rev. Bior 6.8 5.94 5.95
Average Average Average Haar Camera- 6.06 Mandrill 6.11
Wavelet PSNR PSNR PSNR Daubechies man 5.86 5.82
Haar 25.56 25.57 25.65 Daubechies 32 5.94 5.94
Daubechies 18.15 18.02 16.73 Bior 2.2 5.98 6.02
Daubechies 32 19.56 19.40 18.22 Bior 5.5 5.93 5.92
Bior 2.2 20.06 19.93 18.71 Symlets 8 5.94 5.93
Bior 5.5 18.83 18.72 17.54 Coiflets 4 5.94 5.94
Symlets 8 19.08 18.96 17.78 Rev. Bior 6.8 5.94 5.94
Coiflets 4 19.19 19.08 17.89 Haar Cell 6.01 Moon 6.11
Rev. Bior 6.8 19.20 19.08 17.91 Daubechies 5.88 5.82
Daubechies 32 5.94 5.93
Bior 2.2 5.97 6.04
Bior 5.5 5.93 5.91
speckled. The third displays data for a small sample Symlets 8 5.94 5.93
of the images for the watermark recovery process. The Coiflets 4 5.94 5.93
fourth table examines the watermark extraction results, Rev. Bior 6.8 5.94 5.94
without noise, and the fifth table adds noise into the
amalgamation. PSNR values at least 25 dB are, theo-
retically, the least perceptible to the human eye.
Table 4. Watermark Extraction
First, the watermark is embedded in the original
image. No noise is introduced into the image. To sim- Average Minimum Maximum
ulate effects of such innocent problems such as trans- Wavelet PSNR PSNR PSNR
mission errors, or perhaps alterations of the image for Haar 6.094 6.056 6.109
other more nefarious reasons, three types of noise are
Daubechies 5.832 5.796 5.895
then independently applied to the image to simulate im-
Daubechies 32 5.938 5.933 5.944
age corruption. The Gaussian white noise added had a
Bior 2.2 6.010 5.970 6.040
zero mean noise with 0.01 variance. The salt and pepper
Bior 5.5 5.924 5.912 5.932
noise had noise density of 0.04, affecting approximately
Symlets 8 5.930 5.924 5.939
4% of the pixels. Lastly, the speckle added multiplica-
tive noise that is uniformly distributed random noise Coiflets 4 5.935 5.931 5.939
with mean 0 and variance 0.04. Then the watermark is Rev. Bior 6.8 5.943 5.937 5.951
extracted from the noisy image. The results are shown All 5.95 5.932 5.968
in the tables.

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 techniques,“ Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 87, Issue
Table 5. Watermark Extraction with Noise 7, 1999, pages 1079-1107.
Salt and [3] Darko Kirovski and Fabian A. P. Petitcolas, “Blind Pat-
Speckle Gaussian Pepper tern Matching Attack on Watermarking Systems,” IEEE
Average Average Average Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 51, Number
Wavelet PSNR PSNR PSNR 4, 2003, pages 1045-1053.
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Daubechies 5.858 5.859 5.866 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Volume 17, Septem-
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[8] Neil F. Johnson, Zoran Duric, and Sushil Jajodia, In-
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[9] Michael Weeks, Digital Signal Processing Using MAT-
tested, with 2 dB for embedding watermarks (Table
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[10] G. Langelaar, I. Setyawan, and R. L. Lagendijk, “Wa-
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almost every situation the Haar wavelet repeatedly out- and Bruno Forte, “Waterloo Repertoire GreySet
(1 and 2)”, Waterloo Fractal Coding and Analy-
performs the others. Therefore, the size, type and com-
sis Group website, Accessed October 2007, Uni-
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versity of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,
not seem to change the advantage that the simple, but http://links.uwaterloo.ca/greyset1.ba-
effective, Haar Wavelet displays for this watermarking se.html and http://links.uwaterloo.ca/-
application. greyset2.base.html.

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