Basics of Digital Watermarking, Steganography vs.

Watermarking
Dr. Natarajan Meghanathan Associate Professor of Computer Science Jackson State University, Jackson MS 39217 E-mail: natarajan.meghanathan@jsums.edu

Steganography vs. Watermarking

Steganography focuses covert (hidden) point-to-point communication between two parties. Steganographic methods are usually not robust against modification of the data, or have only limited robustness and cannot protect the embedded information against technical modifications that may occur during transmission. Watermarking has the additional notion of resilience against attempts to remove the hidden data.
Even if the existence of the hidden information is known, it should be hard for an attacker to destroy the embedded watermark (could be a number, text or image) without knowledge of a key.

A popular application of watermarking is to give proof of ownership of digital data by embedding copyright statements.
For this application, the embedded information should be robust against manipulations that may attempt to remove it.

A practical implication of the robustness requirement is that watermarking methods can typically embed much less information into cover-data than steganographic methods. Desired Characteristics of a Watermarking System: Imperceptibility, Robustness (cannot be modified), Noninvertibility (cannot be removed), Ability to recover with or without the original data

Other Terms Related to Watermarking

Fingerprinting watermarking where the embedded information is either a unique code specifying the author (originator) of the coverdata or a unique code specifying the recipient of the data. Labeling watermarking where the embedded data may contain any information of interest, such as a unique data identifier. Bitstream watermarking watermarking of compressed data, for example: compressed video. Fragile watermarks watermarks that are applied to detect modifications of the watermarked data, rather than conveying unerasable information.

Watermark Embedding and Recovery Systems

Watermark, W Cover Data, I Secret / Public Key, K

Watermark Embedding System

Watermarked Data, I~

Watermark, W or original data I Test Data, I~ Secret / Public Key, K

Watermark Detection (Recovery) System

Watermark or Confidence measure indicating how likely it is for the given Watermark at the input to be present in the data I~ under inspection

Types of Watermarking Systems

Private Watermarking Non-blind watermarking I~ x I x K x W {0, 1} Takes as input all the four entities embedded watermark for extraction (W), the test data (I~), the original data (I) as a hint to find where the watermark could be in I~ and the secret/public key (K) Outputs a Yes or No response to the question: Does the test data I~ contain the watermark W. Semi-private Watermarking Semi-blind watermarking: I~ x K x W {0, 1} Does not use the original data for detection e.g., video watermarking Answers to the same question as that for private watermarking, but more complicated than private watermarking Public watermarking Blind watermarking I~ x K W Used to extract the watermark from the marked data More complicated of all the three systems

Applications of Watermarking
Copyright protection uses secret key Used to embed information about the source (typically, the copyright owner) of the data in order to prevent other parties from claiming the copyright on the data A data could contain more than one watermarks, indicating copyright info of different sources/owners all such watermarks should be unambiguous. Fingerprinting for traitor tracking uses public/private keys Used to convey information about the legal recipient to identify single distributed copies of the data and trace back illegally produced copies of the data that may circulate. Similar to license numbers assigned to the user of a software product. When the software CD is pirated and used elsewhere, the original user whose CD was used to produce copies would be identified. Copy protection uses public/private keys Multi-media data could be embedded with copy once or copy never watermarks that could be identified by compliant hardware