Digital image watermarking has been widely used in different applications such as copyright protection of digital media, such as audio, image, and video files. Two opposing criteria of robustness and transparency are the goals of watermarking methods. In this paper, we propose a framework for determining the appropriate embedding strength factor. The framework can use most DWT and DCT based blind watermarking approaches. We use Mask R-CNN on the COCO dataset to find a good strength factor for each sub-block. Experiments show that this method is robust against different attacks and has good transparency.
University of Nebraska at Omaha（内布拉斯加大学奥马哈分校）；New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）
Digital image watermarking is the process of embedding and extracting watermark covertly on a carrier image. Incorporating deep learning networks with image watermarking has attracted increasing attention during recent years. However, existing deep learning-based watermarking systems cannot achieve robustness, blindness, and automated embedding and extraction simultaneously. In this paper, a fully automated image watermarking system based on deep neural networks is proposed to generalize the image watermarking processes. An unsupervised deep learning structure and a novel loss computation are …
The goal of video watermarking is to embed a message within a video file in a way such that it minimally impacts the viewing experience but can be recovered even if the video is redistributed and modified, allowing media producers to assert ownership over their content. This paper presents RivaGAN, a novel architecture for robust video watermarking which features a custom attention-based mechanism for embedding arbitrary data as well as two independent adversarial networks which critique the video quality and optimize for robustness. Using this technique, we are able to achieve state-of-the-ar…
Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology（南京信息工程大学）；Jinan University（暨南大学）
Watermarking is an important copyright protection technology which generally embeds the identity information into the carrier imperceptibly. Then the identity can be extracted to prove the copyright from the watermarked carrier even after suffering various attacks. Most of the existing watermarking technologies take the nature images as carriers. Different from the natural images, document images are not so rich in color and texture, and thus have less redundant information to carry watermarks. This paper proposes an end-to-end document image watermarking scheme using the deep neural network. …
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Reversible image watermarking guaranties restoration of both original cover and watermark logo from the watermarked image. Capacity and distortion of the image under reversible watermarking are two important parameters. In this study a reversible watermarking is investigated with focusing on increasing the embedding capacity and reducing the distortion in medical images. Integer wavelet transform is used for embedding where in each iteration, one watermark bit is embedded in one transform coefficient. We devise a novel approach that when a coefficient is modified in an iteration, the produced …
Videos can be easily tampered, copied and redistributed by attackers for illegal and monetary usage. Such behaviors severely jeopardize the interest of content owners. Despite huge efforts made in digital video watermarking for copyright protection, typical distortions in video transmission including signal attacks, geometric attacks and temporal synchronization attacks can still easily erase the embedded signal. Among them, temporal synchronization attacks which include frame dropping, frame insertion and frame rate conversion is one of the most prevalent attacks. To address this issue, we pr…
Videos are prone to tampering attacks that alter the meaning and deceive the audience. Previous video forgery detection schemes find tiny clues to locate the tampered areas. However, attackers can successfully evade supervision by destroying such clues using video compression or blurring. This paper proposes a video watermarking network for tampering localization. We jointly train a 3D-UNet-based watermark embedding network and a decoder that predicts the tampering mask. The perturbation made by watermark embedding is close to imperceptible. Considering that there is no off-the-shelf different…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute（清华-伯克利深圳学院）
Information security is a critical issue in modern society and image watermarking can effectively prevent unauthorized information access. Optical image watermarking techniques generally have advantages of parallel high-speed processing and multi-dimensional capabilities compared with digital approaches. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the research works related to optical image hiding and watermarking techniques conducted in the past decade. The past research works are focused on two major aspects, various optical systems for image hiding and the methods for embedding optical sy…
Digital image watermarking seeks to protect the digital media information from unauthorized access, where the message is embedded into the digital image and extracted from it, even some noises or distortions are applied under various data processing including lossy image compression and interactive content editing. Traditional image watermarking solutions easily suffer from robustness when specified with some prior constraints, while recent deep learning-based watermarking methods could not tackle the information loss problem well under various separate pipelines of feature encoder and decoder…
Estimation of the Embedding capacity is an important problem specifically in reversible multi-pass watermarking and is required for analysis before any image can be watermarked. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for estimating the embedding capacity of a given cover image under multi-pass embedding, without actually embedding the watermark. We demonstrate this for a class of reversible watermarking schemes which operate on a disjoint group of pixels, specifically for pixel pairs. The proposed algorithm iteratively updates the co-occurrence matrix at every stage, to estimate the mul…
Digital watermarking is extensively used in ownership authentication and copyright protection. In this paper, we propose an efficient thresholding scheme to improve the watermark embedding procedure in an image. For the proposed algorithm, watermark casting is performed separately in each block of an image, and embedding in each block continues until a certain structural similarity threshold is reached. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that our scheme improves the imperceptibility of the watermark when the capacity remains fix, and at the same time, robustness against attacks is assured. The …
Reversible audio watermarking (RAW) is a promising technique in various applications. To simultaneously meet the demand of achieving high imperceptibility and robustness, this paper proposes a novel RAW scheme based on lattices. The scheme is referred to as Meet-in-the-Middle Embedding (MME), in which the lattice quantization errors are properly scaled and added back to the quantized host signals. Simulations show that MME excels in a wide range of metrics including signal-to-watermark ratio (SWR), objective difference grade (ODG), and bit error rate (BER).
While many games were designed for steganography and robust watermarking, few focused on reversible watermarking. We present a two-encoder game related to the rate-distortion optimization of content-adaptive reversible watermarking. In the game, Alice first hides a payload into a cover. Then, Bob hides another payload into the modified cover. The embedding strategy of Alice affects the embedding capacity of Bob. The embedding strategy of Bob may produce data-extraction errors to Alice. Both want to embed as many pure secret bits as possible, subjected to an upper-bounded distortion. We investi…
In unsecured network environments, ownership protection of digital contents, such as images, is becoming a growing concern. Different watermarking methods have been proposed to address the copyright protection of digital materials. Watermarking methods are challenged with conflicting parameters of imperceptibility and robustness. While embedding a watermark with a high strength factor increases robustness, it also decreases imperceptibility of the watermark. Thus embedding in visually less sensitive regions, i.e., complex image blocks could satisfy both requirements. This paper presents a new …
The availability and easy access to digital communication increase the risk of copyrighted material piracy. In order to detect illegal use or distribution of data, digital watermarking has been proposed as a suitable tool. It protects the copyright of digital content by embedding imperceptible information into the data in the presence of an adversary. The goal of the adversary is to remove the copyrighted content of the data. Therefore, an efficient watermarking framework must be robust to multiple image-processing operations known as attacks that can alter embedded copyright information. Anot…
Growth of the Internet and networked multimedia systems has emphasized the need for copyright protection of the media. Media can be images, audio clips, videos and etc. Digital watermarking is today extensively used for many applications such as authentication of ownership or identification of illegal copies. Digital watermark is an invisible or maybe visible structure added to the original media (known as asset). Images are considered as communication channel when they are subject to a watermark embedding procedure so in the case of embedding a digital watermark in an image, the capacity of t…
A new local watermarking method based on histogram shifting has been proposed in this paper to deal with various signal processing attacks (e.g. median filtering, JPEG compression and Gaussian noise addition) and geometric attacks (e.g. rotation, scaling and cropping). A feature detector is used to select local areas for embedding. Then stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is applied on each local area for denoising by setting the corresponding diagonal coefficients to zero. With the implementation of histogram shifting, the watermark is embedded into denoised local areas. Meanwhile, a secret ke…
Development of digital content has increased the necessity of copyright protection by means of watermarking. Imperceptibility and robustness are two important features of watermarking algorithms. The goal of watermarking methods is to satisfy the tradeoff between these two contradicting characteristics. Recently watermarking methods in transform domains have displayed favorable results. In this paper, we present an adaptive blind watermarking method which has high transparency in areas that are important to human visual system. We propose a fuzzy system for adaptive control of the embedding st…
Nowadays, with the development of public network usage, medical information is transmitted throughout the hospitals. The watermarking system can help for the confidentiality of medical information distributed over the internet. In medical images, regions-of-interest (ROI) contain diagnostic information. The watermark should be embedded only into non-regions-of-interest (NROI) to keep diagnostic information without distortion. Recently, ROI based watermarking has attracted the attention of the medical research community. The ROI map can be used as an embedding key for improving confidentiality …
In the watermark detection scenario, also known as zero-bit watermarking, a watermark, carrying no hidden message, is inserted in content. The watermark detector checks for the presence of this particular weak signal in content. The article looks at this problem from a classical detection theory point of view, but with side information enabled at the embedding side. This means that the watermark signal is a function of the host content. Our study is twofold. The first step is to design the best embedding function for a given detection function, and the best detection function for a given embed…
Content-independent watermarks and block-wise independency can be considered as vulnerabilities in semi-fragile watermarking methods. In this paper to achieve the objectives of semi-fragile watermarking techniques, a method is proposed to not have the mentioned shortcomings. In the proposed method, the watermark is generated by relying on image content and a key. Furthermore, the embedding scheme causes the watermarked blocks to become dependent on each other, using a key. In the embedding phase, the image is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks. In order to detect and separate the differen…
In this paper, we carry out a performance analysis from a probabilistic perspective to introduce the EDHVW methods' expected performances and limitations. Then, we propose a new general error diffusion based halftone visual watermarking (EDHVW) method, Content aware Double-sided Embedding Error Diffusion (CaDEED), via considering the expected watermark decoding performance with specific content of the cover images and watermark, different noise tolerance abilities of various cover image content and the different importance levels of every pixel (when being perceived) in the secret pattern (wat…
With the increasing use of the internet and the ease of exchange of multimedia content, the protection of ownership rights has become a significant concern. Watermarking is an efficient means for this purpose. In many applications, real-time watermarking is required, which demands hardware implementation of low complexity and robust algorithm. In this paper, an adaptive watermarking is presented, which uses embedding in different bit-planes to achieve transparency and robustness. Local disorder of pixels is analyzed to control the strength of the watermark. A new low complexity method for diso…
Digital watermarking is a technique of information adding or information hiding in order to identify the owner of the data in multimedia content. It seems that a signal or digital image can permanently embed over another digital data providing a good way to protect intellectual property from illegal replication. The cover data that is transmitted through the internet hides the watermark in a computer aided assertion method such that it becomes undetectable. Finally it stands as a hindrance over many operations without harming the embedded host document. Unfortunately, many owners of the digita…
In this paper, a robust and blind watermarking method is proposed, which is highly resistant to the common image watermarking attacks, such as noises, compression, and image quality enhancement processing. In this method, Arnold Cat map is used as a pre-processing on the host image, which increases the security and imperceptibility of embedding watermark bits with a strong gain factor. Moreover, two pseudo-noise strings with weak correlation are used as the symbol of each 0 or 1 bit of the watermark, which increases the accuracy in detecting the state of watermark bits at extraction phase in c…
Increasing production and exchange of multimedia content has increased the need for better protection of copyright by means of watermarking. Different methods have been proposed to satisfy the tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness as two important characteristics in watermarking while maintaining proper data-embedding capacity. Many watermarking methods use image independent set of parameters. Different images possess different potentials for robust and transparent hosting of watermark data. To overcome this deficiency, in this paper we have proposed a new hierarchical adaptive wate…
Software watermarking involves embedding a unique identifier or, equivalently, a watermark value within a software to prove owner's authenticity and thus to prevent or discourage copyright infringement. Towards the embedding process, several graph theoretic watermarking algorithmic techniques encode the watermark values as graph structures and embed them in application programs. Recently, we presented an efficient codec system for encoding a watermark number $w$ as a reducible permutation graph $F[π^*]$ through the use of self-inverting permutations $π^*$. In this paper, we propose a dynamic w…
Multiple watermarking technique, embedding several watermarks in one carrier, has enabled many interesting applications. In this study, a novel multiple watermarking algorithm is proposed based on the spirit of spread transform dither modulation (STDM). It can embed multiple watermarks into the same region and the same transform domain of one image; meanwhile, the embedded watermarks can be extracted independently and blindly in the detector without any interference. Furthermore, to improve the fidelity of the watermarked image, the properties of the dither modulation quantizer and the propose…
CoreMark: Toward Robust and Universal Text Watermarking Technique
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学航空宇航学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机与数据科学学院）
Video Watermarking serves as a new technology mainly used to provide security to the illegal distribution of digital video over the web. The purpose of any video watermarking scheme is to embed extra information into video in such a way that must be perceptually undetectable while still holding enough information in order to extract the watermark beginning with the resultant video. Information which is embedded within the original image is a Digital Watermark, which could be visible or invisible. To improved more security, embedding and extraction Watermark process should be complex against at…
Watermarking is a technique for hiding of data in a medium coverage so that its presence is not detectable by a human eye and is recoverable only by the authorized recipient. Two of the most important features of watermarked image are transparency and robustness which are largely related to the security of watermarking algorithms. In this paper, an image watermarking scheme based on BCH error correction code in Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) domain is considered. Before embedding process, the watermark is encoded through BCH coding. Then it is embedded into the Discrete Cosine Transforma…
University of Nebraska Omaha（内布拉斯加大学奥马哈分校）；New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）
Digital image watermarking is the process of embedding and extracting a watermark covertly on a cover-image. To dynamically adapt image watermarking algorithms, deep learning-based image watermarking schemes have attracted increased attention during recent years. However, existing deep learning-based watermarking methods neither fully apply the fitting ability to learn and automate the embedding and extracting algorithms, nor achieve the properties of robustness and blindness simultaneously. In this paper, a robust and blind image watermarking scheme based on deep learning neural networks is p…
Audio watermarking has played an important role in multimedia security. In many applications using audio watermarking, D/A and A/D conversions (denoted by DA/AD in this paper) are often involved. In previous works, however, the robustness issue of audio watermarking against the DA/AD conversions has not drawn sufficient attention yet. In our extensive investigation, it has been found that the degradation of a watermarked audio signal caused by the DA/AD conversions manifests itself mainly in terms of wave magnitude distortion and linear temporal scaling, making the watermark extraction failed.…
Watermarking is the process of embedding information into an image that can survive under distortions, while requiring the encoded image to have little or no perceptual difference from the original image. Recently, deep learning-based methods achieved impressive results in both visual quality and message payload under a wide variety of image distortions. However, these methods all require differentiable models for the image distortions at training time, and may generalize poorly to unknown distortions. This is undesirable since the types of distortions applied to watermarked images are usually…
To hide a binary pattern in the palette image a steganographic scheme with blind detection is considered. The embedding algorithm uses the Lehmer code by palette color permutations for which the cover image palette is generally required. The found transformation between the palette and RGB images allows to extract the hidden data without any cover work.
This paper investigates a secure blind watermarking scheme. The main idea of the scheme not only protects the watermark information but also the embedding positions. To achieve a higher level of security, we propose a sub key generation mechanism based on the singular value decomposition and hash function, where sub keys depend on both the main key and the feature codes of the original image. The different sub keys ensure that the embedding positions are randomly selected for different original images. Watermark is embedded in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the scrambled o…
This paper introduces a blind watermarking based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). We propose an iterative learning framework to secure robustness of watermarking. One loop of learning process consists of the following three stages: Watermark embedding, attack simulation, and weight update. We have learned a network that can detect a 1-bit message from a image sub-block. Experimental results show that this learned network is an extension of the frequency domain that is widely used in existing watermarking scheme. The proposed scheme achieved robustness against geometric and signal proce…
This paper investigates the multiplicative spread spectrum watermarking method for the image. The information bit is spreaded into middle-frequency Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of each block of an image using a generated pseudo-random sequence. Unlike the conventional signal modeling, we suppose that both signal and noise are distributed with Laplacian distribution because the sample loss of digital media can be better modeled with this distribution than the Gaussian one. We derive the optimum decoder for the proposed embedding method thanks to the maximum likelihood decoding s…
A novel digital watermarking for ownership verification and image authentication applications using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is proposed in this paper. Most previous proposed watermarking algorithms embed sequences of random numbers as watermarks. Here binary images are taken as watermark for embedding. In the proposed approach, the host image is converted into the YCbCr color space and then its Y channel decomposed into wavelet coefficients. The selected approximation coefficients are quantized and then their four least significant bits of the quantized coefficients are replaced by th…
To address the security risk caused by fixed offset mapping and the limited recoverability of random mapping used in image watermarking, we propose an image self-embedding fragile watermarking algorithm based on deneighborhood mapping. First, the image is divided into several 2*2 blocks, and authentication watermark and recovery watermark are generated based on the average value of the image blocks. Then, the denighborhood mapping is implemented as, for each image block, its mapping block is randomly selected outside it's neighborhood whose size is specified by a parameter. Finally, the authen…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；Seattle University（西雅图大学）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）
Digital contents have grown dramatically in recent years, leading to increased attention to copyright. Image watermarking has been considered one of the most popular methods for copyright protection. With the recent advancements in applying deep neural networks in image processing, these networks have also been used in image watermarking. Robustness and imperceptibility are two challenging features of watermarking methods that the trade-off between them should be satisfied. In this paper, we propose to use an end-to-end network for watermarking. We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to c…
Video watermarking is extensively used in many media-oriented applications for embedding watermarks, i.e. hidden digital data, in a video sequence to protect the video from illegal copying and to identify manipulations made in the video. In case of an invisible watermark, the human eye can not perceive any difference in the video, but a watermark extraction application can read the watermark and obtain the embedded information. Although numerous methodologies exist for embedding watermarks, many of them have shortcomings with respect to performance efficiency, especially over a distributed net…
Department of Computer Science University of Nebraska Omaha（内布拉斯加大学奥马哈分校计算机科学系）
This paper presents a deep learning-based audio-in-image watermarking scheme. Audio-in-image watermarking is the process of covertly embedding and extracting audio watermarks on a cover-image. Using audio watermarks can open up possibilities for different downstream applications. For the purpose of implementing an audio-in-image watermarking that adapts to the demands of increasingly diverse situations, a neural network architecture is designed to automatically learn the watermarking process in an unsupervised manner. In addition, a similarity network is developed to recognize the audio waterm…
Watermarking is an operation of embedding an information into an image in a way that allows to identify ownership of the image despite applying some distortions on it. In this paper, we presented a novel end-to-end solution for embedding and recovering the watermark in the digital image using convolutional neural networks. The method is based on spreading the message over the spatial domain of the image, hence reducing the "local bits per pixel" capacity. To obtain the model we used adversarial training and applied noiser layers between the encoder and the decoder. Moreover, we broadened the s…
In order to protect the intellectual property (IP) of deep neural networks (DNNs), many existing DNN watermarking techniques either embed watermarks directly into the DNN parameters or insert backdoor watermarks by fine-tuning the DNN parameters, which, however, cannot resist against various attack methods that remove watermarks by altering DNN parameters. In this paper, we bypass such attacks by introducing a structural watermarking scheme that utilizes channel pruning to embed the watermark into the host DNN architecture instead of crafting the DNN parameters. To be specific, during watermar…
