Watermarking

IT6902; Semester B, 2004/2005; Leung

 Information Hiding:
Steganography and Watermarking

Dr. Mohammed Al-Mualla and Prof. Hussain Al-Ahmad

Multimedia Communication and Signal Processing (MCSP)

Research Group

Etisalat College of Engineering

P.O.Box: 980, Sharjah, UAE
Tel: +971 6 5611333, Fax: +971 6 5611789,
e-mail: {almualla, alahmad}@ece.ac.ae
 Outline
• Introduction to Information Hiding
• Steganography
– Definition and History
– Applications
– Basic Principles
– Examples of Techniques
– Demos
• Watermarking
– Definition and History
– Applications
– Basic Principles
– Requirements
– Attacks
– Evaluation and Benchmarking
– Examples
 Information Hiding

• Information Hiding is a general term encompassing

many subdisciplines
• Two important subdisciplines are: steganography and
watermarking
• Steganography:
– Hiding: keeping the existence of the information secret
• Watermarking:
– Hiding: making the information imperceptible
• Information hiding is different than cryptography
(cryptography is about protecting the content of
messages)
 Watermarking:
Definition
• Watermarking: is the practice of imperceptibly altering a cover to
embed a message about that cover
• Watermarking is closely related to steganography, but there are
differences between the two:
– In watermarking the message is related to the cover
– Steganography typically relates to covert point-to-point communication
between two parties
– Therefore, steganography requires only limited robustness
– Watermarking is often used whenever the cover is available to parties
who know the existence of the hidden data and may have an interest in
removing it
– Therefore, watermarking has the additional notion of resilience against
attempts to remove the hidden data
• Watermarks are inseparable from the cover in which they are
embedded. Unlike cryptography, watermarks can protect content
even after they are decoded
 Watermarking:
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
anticounterfeiting 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
 Watermarking:
Applications
1. Copyright protection
– Most prominent application
– Embed information about the owner to prevent others from claiming
copyright
– Require very high level of robustness
2. Copy protection
– Embed watermark to disallow unauthorized copying of the cover
– For example, a compliant DVD player will not playback or copy data
that carry a “copy never” watermark
3. Content Authentication
– Embed a watermark to detect modifications to the cover
– The watermark in this case has low robustness, “fragile”
 Watermarking:
Applications
4. Transaction Tracking
– Embed a watermark to convey information about the legal
recipient of the cover
– This is useful to monitor or trace back illegally produced
copies of the cover
– This is usually referred to as “fingerprinting”
5. Broadcast Monitoring
– Embed a watermark in the cover and use automatic
monitoring to verify whether cover was broadcasted as
agreed
 Watermarking:
Basic Principles

TRANSMITTER RECEIVER

cover c watermark w or
cover c

watermarked data watermarked data

s Insecure S’
Encoder Decoder
(Embedding) Channel (Extraction)
(Attacks)

watermark w key k key k watermark w’

or
confidence measure
 Watermarking:
Requirements
• Imperceptibility
– The modifications caused by watermark embedding should
be below the perceptible threshold
• Robustness
– The ability of the watermark to resist distortion introduced
by standard or malicious data processing
• Security
– A watermark is secure if knowing the algorithms for
embedding and extracting does not help unauthorised party
to detect or remove the watermark
 Watermarking:
Requirements
• Payload
– The amount of information that can be stored in a
watermark
• Informed (nonoblivious, or private) Watermarking:
– The original unwatermarked cover is required to perform
the extraction process
• Blind (oblivious, or public) Watermarking:
– The original unwatermarked cover is NOT required to
perform the extraction process
 Watermarking:
Attacks
• Signal enhancement (sharpening, contrast enhancement, etc.)
• Additive and multiplicative noise (gaussian, uniform, etc.)
• Filtering (High pass, low pass, linear, nonlinear, etc.)
• Lossy compression (JPEG, MPEG-x, H.26x, etc.)
• Geometric transforms (translation, rotation, etc.)
• Data reduction (cropping, clipping, etc.)
• Transcoding (MPEG2 ⇒ H.263, etc.)
• D/A and A/D conversion (print-scan, etc.)
• Multiple watermarking
• Collusion attack
• Mosaic attack
 Watermarking:
Evaluation and Benchmarking

• Subjective Evaluation:
– Subject is asked to rate the perceptibility of the artefacts
(5=imperceptible, 4=perceptible but not annoying,
3=slightly annoying, 2=annoying, 1=very annoying)
• Objective Evaluation:
– MSE, SNR, PSNR, NCC, etc.
• Benchmarking Software:
– Unzign
– StirMark
– CheckMark
– OptiMark
 Watermarking:
Examples
• Informed Watermarking Method of Cox et al.

Original Extract V = [v1 , v2 , K, v N ]

image DCT largest N
D coefficients

Random X = [x1 , x2 , L, x N ] Embed

key k Number
vi′ = vi (1 + α xi )
Generator

V’
Watermarked Insert back
Image IDCT N modified
D’ coefficients

ENCODER
 Watermarking:
Examples
• Informed Watermarking Method of Cox et al.

Original Extract V = [v1 , v2 , K, v N ]

image DCT largest N
D coefficients Extract
vi *
Attacked Extract V* = [v *1 , v *2 , K , v * N ] xi * = ( − 1) / α
vi
image DCT N coeff. from
D* same locations
X*

Random X = [x1 , x2 , L, x N ] Calculate

key k Number
similarity
Generator measure

Decision
DECODER
 Watermarking:
Examples

original α = 0.1 α = 0.4 α = 0.6

original N = 2000 N = 4000 N = 6000

 Watermarking:
Examples

original JPEG q=100 JPEG q=80 JPEG q=10

NC=0.999 NC=0.993 NC=0.557

original Watermarked Cropped

NC=0.999 NC=0.672
 Watermarking:
Examples
Original Image
512 X 512 Watermarked
Image DCT-domain
DCT
Embedding
without
IDCT Walsh Coding
Watermark
128 X 64

Watermarked
Original Image Image
512 X 512 DCT
DCT-domain
IDCT Embedding
with
Walsh Walsh Coding
Coding

128 x 64
Watermarking:
Examples
 References
• Original source of the slides:
http://www.emirates.org/ieee/events.html#Digital_Watermarking
• Additional references:
– S. P. Mohanty, "Digital Watermarking: A Tutorial Review", Report, Dept. of
Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, 1999.
http://www.cs.unt.edu/~smohanty/research/Reports/MohantyWatermarkingSurve
y1999.pdf
– Podilchuk, C.I. and Delp, E.J. "Digital watermarking: algorithms and
applications", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 18, Issue 4, pp.33-46,
July 2001
– Perez-Gonzalez, F. and Hernandez, J.R. "A tutorial on digital watermarking",
Proc. IEEE 33rd Annual 1999 Int. Carnahan Conf. on Security Technology,
pp.286-292, Oct. 1999
– Nikolaidis, N. and Pitas, I. "Digital image watermarking: an overview", IEEE
Int. Conf. on Multimedia Computing and Systems, Vol. 1, pp.1-6, June 1999

IT6902; Semester B, 2004/2005; Leung Watermarking