CHAPTER-1

INTRODUCTION

Digital watermarking is a technique which allows an individual to add hidden copyright notices
or other verification messages to digital audio, video, or image signals and documents. Such
hidden message is a group of bits describing information pertaining to the signal or to the author
of the signal (name, place, etc.). The technique takes its name from watermarking of paper or
money as a security measure. Digital watermarking is not a form of steganography, in which data
is hidden in the message without the end user's knowledge, although some watermarking
techniques have the steganography feature of not being perceivable by the human eye.
The enormous popularity of the World Wide Web in the early 1990's demonstrated the
commercial potential of offering multimedia resources through the digital networks. Since
commercial interests seek to use the digital networks to offer digital media for profit, they have a
strong interest in protecting their ownership rights. Digital watermarking has been proposed as
one way to accomplish this.

1.2 Purpose of digital watermarking:

Invisible watermarks, on the other hand, are potentially useful as a means of identifying the
source, author, creator, owner, and distributor or authorized consumer of a document or image.
For this purpose, the objective is to permanently and unalterably mark the image so that the
credit or assignment is beyond dispute. In the event of illicit usage, the watermark would
facilitate the claim of ownership, the receipt of copyright revenues, or the success of prosecution
[10].

Watermarking has also been proposed to trace images in the event of their illicit redistribution.
Whereas past infringement with copyrighted documents was often limited by the unfeasibility of
large-scale photocopying and distribution, modern digital networks make large-scale
dissemination simple and inexpensive. Digital watermarking makes it possible to uniquely mark
each image for every buyer. If that buyer then makes an illicit copy, the illicit duplication may be
convincingly demonstrated [11].

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1.3 Types of Watermarks:

Watre Marking

According to working domain

According to type of document
According to human perception
According to application

Special Domain Frequency domain Source Based Destination Based

Text Video Audio Image

Visible Invisible

Robust Fragile

Private Public Invertible Non-Invertible Quasi-InvertibleNonquasi-Invertible

1.3.1 Visible watermarks:

Visible watermarks are an extension of the concept of logos. Such watermarks are applicable to
images only. These logos are inlaid into the image but they are transparent. Such watermarks

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cannot be removed by cropping the center part of the image. Further, such watermarks are
protected against attacks such as statistical analysis[11].
1.3.2 Invisible watermark:
Invisible watermark is hidden in the content. It can be detected by an authorized agency only.
Such watermarks are used for content and/or author authentication and for detecting
unauthorized copier [12].
1.3.3. Public watermark:
Such a watermark can be read or retrieved by anyone using the specialized algorithm. In this
sense, public watermarks are not secure. However, public watermarks are useful for carrying IPR
information. They are good alternatives to labels [13].
1.3.4 Fragile watermark:
Fragile watermarks are also known as tamper-proof watermarks. Such watermarks are destroyed
by data manipulation.

1.3.5 Private Watermark:

Private watermarks are also known as secure watermarks. To read or retrieve such a watermark,
it is necessary to have the secret key.
1.3.6 Perceptual watermarks:
A perceptual watermark exploits the aspects of human sensory system to provide invisible yet
robust watermark. Such watermarks are also known as transparent watermarks that provide
extremely high quality contents [12].
1.3.7 Bit-stream watermark:
The term is sometimes used for watermarking of compressed data such as video.

1.4 Watermarking Process:

Digital Watermarking software looks for noise in digital media and replaces it with useful
information. A digital media file is nothing more than a large list of 0’s and 1’s. The
watermarking software determines which of these 0’s and 1’s correspond to redundant or
irrelevant details. For example, the software might identify details in an image that are too fine
for the human eye to see and flag the corresponding 0’s and 1’s as irrelevant noise. Later the
flagged 0’s and 1’s can be replaced by a digital watermark [15].
The diagram of Watermarking process is as shown below:

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The diagram of Watermarking process is as shown below:

User key

Input image WATERMARK INSERTION Watermark Image

Watermark

(a) Insert the watermark

User key

Watermark Extraction Extracted watermark

Watermarked Image

(b) Watermark Extraction

The following two sequences of images demonstrate a typical watermark embedding and
extraction process applied to a static image. It is notable that a slight degradation of the original
image occurs when the watermark is embedded. However, the retrieved watermark is very close
to the original watermark, which can help resolve ownership issues.

1.5 Advantages of Digital Watermarking:

 Embedding the checksum only changes (on average) half the number of pixel. So less
visual distortion.

 Can hold multiple watermarks as long as they don’t overlap.

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  Extremely simple and fast.

 Extremely fragile. Any change to the checksum causes the failure of the verification
procedure.

 Entire watermark can be removed by removing the LSB plane. Can’t survive lossy
compression.

1.6 DWT in Image Processing: The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is a linear
transformation that operates on a data vector whose length is an integer power of two,
transforming it into a numerically different vector of the same length. It is a tool that separates
data into different frequency components, and then studies each component with resolution
matched to its scale. DWT is computed with a cascade of filtering followed by a factor 2 sub
sampling. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is used in a wide variety of signal processing
applications. 2-D discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposes an image or a video frame into
sub-images, 3 details and 1 approximation. The approximation sub-image resembles the original
on 1/4 the scale of the original. The 2-D DWT is an application of the 1-D DWT in both the
horizontal and the vertical directions. DWT separates the frequency band of an image into a
lower resolution approximation sub-band (LL) as well as horizontal (HL), vertical (LH) and
diagonal (HH) detail components. Embedding the watermark in low frequencies obtained by
wavelet decomposition increases the robustness with respect to attacks that have low pass
characteristics like filtering, lossy compression and geometric distortions while making the
scheme more sensitive to contrast adjustment, gamma correction, and histogram equalization.
Since the HVS is less sensitive to high frequencies, embedding the watermark in high frequency
sub-bands makes the watermark more imperceptible while embedding in low frequencies makes
it more robust against a variety of attacks. It is useful for processing of non-stationary signals.
The transform is based on small waves, called wavelets, of varying frequency and limited
duration. Wavelet transform provides both frequency and spatial description of an image. Unlike
conventional Fourier transform, temporal information is retained in this transformation process.
Wavelets are created by translations and dilations of a fixed function called mother wavelet.
DWT is the multiresolution description of an image the decoding can be processed sequentially
from a low resolution to the higher resolution. The DWT splits the signal into high and low

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frequency parts. The high frequency part contains information about the edge components, while
the low frequency part is split again into high and low frequency parts. The high frequency
components are usually used for watermarking since the human eye is less sensitive to changes
in edges. In two dimensional applications, for each level of decomposition, we first perform the
DWT in the vertical direction, followed by the DWT in the horizontal direction. After the first
level of decomposition, there are 4 sub-bands: LL1, LH1, HL1, and HH1. For each successive
level of decomposition, the LL subband of the previous level is used as the input. To perform
second level decomposition, the DWT is applied to LL1 band which decomposes the LL1 band
into the four sub To perform third level decomposition, the DWT is applied to LL2 band which
decompose this band into the four sub-bands – LL3, LH3, HL3, HH3. This results in 10 sub-
bands per component. LH1, HL1, and HH1 contain the highest frequency bands present in the
image tile, while LL3 contains the lowest frequency band. DWT is currently used in a wide
variety of signal processing applications, such as in audio and video compression, removal of
noise in audio, and the simulation of wireless antenna distribution. Wavelets have their energy
concentrated 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 [7].

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 Chapter-2
Review of Literature
Nikita Kashyap, “Image Watermarking Using 3-Level Discrete Wavelet Transform
(DWT)”, 2012

In this paper they introduced [1] about implemented a robust image watermarking technique for
the copyright protection based on 3-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT). In this technique a
multi-bit watermark is embedded into the low frequency sub-band of a cover image by using
alpha blending technique. The insertion and extraction of the watermark in the grayscale cover
image is found to be simpler than other transform techniques. The proposed method is compared
with the 1-level and 2-level DWT based image watermarking methods by using statistical
parameters such as peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE). The
experimental results demonstrate that the watermarks generated with the proposed algorithm are
invisible and the quality of watermarked image and the recovered image are improved. In this
paper, an image watermarking technique based on a 3-level discrete wavelet transform has been
implemented. This technique can embed the invisible watermark into salient features of the
image using alpha blending technique. Experiment results shows that the quality of the
watermarked image and the recovered watermark are dependent only on the scaling factors k and
q and also indicate that the three level DWT provide better performance than 1-level and 2-level
DWT. All the results obtained for the recovered images and the watermark are identical to the
original images.

Chun-Shien Lu and Hong-Yuan Mark Liao, “Multipurpose Watermarking for Image

Authentication and Protection”, 2001
In this paper they proposed [2] a novel multipurpose watermarking scheme, in which robust and
fragile watermarks are simultaneously embedded, for copyright protection and content
authentication. By quantizing a host image’s wavelet coefficients as masking threshold units
(MTUs), two complementary watermarks are embedded using cocktail watermarking and they
canbe blindly extracted without access to the host image. For the purpose of image protection,
the new scheme guarantees that, no matter what kind of attack is encountered, at least one

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watermark can survive well. On the other hand, for the purpose of image authentication, our
approach can locate the part of the image that has been tampered with and tolerate some
incidental processes that have been executed. Experimental results show that the performance of
our multipurpose watermarking scheme is indeed superb in terms of robustness and fragility.

Alberto Martin and Sabri Tosunoglu, “Image Processing Techniques For Machine Vision”,
2000
In this paper [3] they explained about Image Processing Algorithms are the basis for Image
Computer Analysis and Machine Vision. Employing a theoretical foundation – Image Algebra
and powerful development tools – Visual C++, Visual Fortran, Visual Basic, and Visual Java
high-level and efficient Computer Vision Techniques have been developed. This paper analyzes
different Image Processing Algorithms by classifying them in logical groups. In addition,
specific methods are presented illustrating the application of such techniques to the real-world
images. In most cases more than one method is used. This allows a basis for comparison of
different methods as advantageous features as well as negative characteristics of each technique
is delineated.

Navnidhi Chaturvedi, Dr.S.J.Basha, “Comparison of Digital Image watermarking Methods

DWT & DWT-DCT on the Basis of PSNR”, 2012
In this paper [4] they described about the authenticity & copyright protection are two major
problems in handling digital multimedia. The Image watermarking is most popular method for
copyright protection by discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) which performs 2 Level
Decomposition of original (cover) image and watermark image is embedded in Lowest Level
(LL) sub band of cover image. Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform (IDWT) is used to recover
original image from watermarked image. And Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) which convert
image into Blocks of M bits and then reconstruct using IDCT. In this paper we have
compared watermarking using DWT & DWT-DCT methods performance analysis on basis
of PSNR, Similarity factor of watermark and recovered watermark.

Ali Al-Haj, “Combined DWT-DCT Digital Image Watermarking”, 2007

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In this paper author [5] described about the proliferation of digitized media due to the rapid
growth of networked multimedia systems, has created an urgent need for copyright
enforcement technologies that can protect copyright ownership of multimedia objects.
Digital image watermarking is one such technology that has been developed to protect
digital images from illegal manipulations. In particular, digital image watermarking
algorithms which are based on the discrete wavelet transform have been widely
recognized to be more prevalent than others. This is due to the wavelets' excellent
spatial localization, frequency spread, and multi-resolution characteristics, which are similar
to the theoretical models of the human visual system. In this paper, they describe an
imperceptible and a robust combined DWT-DCT digital image watermarking algorithm.
The algorithm watermarks a given digital image using a combination of the Discrete
Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT). Performance
evaluation results show that combining the two transforms improved the performance of
the watermarking algorithms that are based solely on the DWT transform.
Surya Pratap Singh, “A Robust Watermarking Approach using DCT-DWT”, 2012
This paper presents [6] a robust watermarking technique for color and grayscale image.
The proposed method involves many techniques to conform a secure and robust
watermarking. In the proposed technique the watermark is embedded in 3 rd level of DWT
(Discrete Wavelet Transform) and before embedding the watermark image is passed
through chaotic encryption process for its security, other important thing is that in the
proposed method watermark is embedded in the form of DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform)
with special coefficient shifting algorithm to minimize the impact on main image. The
performance of the proposed watermarking is robust to a variety of image processing
techniques, such as JPEG compression, enhancement, resizing, and geometric operations.

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 Chapter-3
Present Work
Problem Formulation
With the rapid growth of internet the various digital methods has been proposed to protect the
multimedia information from the non authorized accesses use and change. Among all the
proposed methods the watermarking technique is the most common technique for protecting the
multimedia data for unauthorized access. The water marking methods have been categorized as
spatial domain method and frequency domain method. In spatial domain method we modify the
lower order bits of cover image to embed the water mark. The main advantage of this technique
is of low complexity and less computational values. But this technique is very robust to certain
types of security attacks. The second method is frequency domain transform method. These
methods are based upon the using of some invertible transformations like discrete cosine
transform i.e. DTC. Discrete Fourier transforms (DFT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)
to host image. To embed the water mark in the image simply changes the coefficient value of
these transforms according to the watermark and the inverse transform is applied to the original
image. These methods are too complicated and require more computational power. These
methods are also provides more reverts to the security attacks. The another method is single
value decomposition (SVD) technique. I

3.2 Objectives: The main objectives are:

1. To study and analyze various machine learning algorithms for image watermarking

2. To improve performance of DWT based OS-ELC machine learning algorithm for blind
watermarking

3. The proposed improvement is based on vector quantization technique with machine

learning algorithm in watermarking

4. Implement proposed and existing algorithm, compare results in terms of various

parameters

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3.3 Methodology:
1. To study the various watermarking techniques there are many techniques present. These
various techniques are Discrete Wavelet Transformation, Discrete Cosine Transformation
and singular Value Decomposition.

2. To implement the DCT-SVD technique and analysis the processing time computational
power and robustness of the algorithm against security attack.

3. To calculate the PNSR value of the DCT-SVD technique.

4. The enhancement will be made in SVD, DCT, DWT technique by applying Kalman
Filtering to reduce PNSR value and increase robustness of the algorithm.

5. The existing DCT-SVD technique and enhanced DCT-SVD technique will be implement
and results of PNSR value and robustness will be compare graphically and in tabular
form.

1. Kalman Filtering: In radio communication systems, filtering is a desirable factor. As radio

communication signals are often corrupted with noise, a good filtering algorithm is required
to remove noise from electromagnetic signals while retaining the useful information. Kalman
Filtering is an effective method to filter impurities in linear systems. The kalman filter
basically consists of a set of mathematical equations that provides an efficient computational
means to estimate the state of a process that minimizes the mean of the squared error. It
operates recursively on streams of noisy input data to produce statistically optimal results
The filter is very powerful in several aspects: it supports estimations of past, present, and
even future states, and it can do so even when the precise nature of the modeled system is
unknown.

2. Gabor Filtering: The images are filtered using the real parts of various different Gabor
filter kernels. The mean and variance of the filtered images are then used as features for
classification, which is based on the least squared error for simplicity.

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 3. Salt and Pepper Filetring: We consider salt-and-pepper noise, for which a certain
amount of the pixels inthe image are either black or white (hence the name of the noise).
Salt-and-pepper noise can, e.g., be used to model defects in the CCD or in the
transmission of the image. Given the probability r (with 0 ≤ r ≤ 1) that a pixel is
corrupted, we can introduce salt-and-pepper noise in an image by setting a fraction of r/2
randomly selected pixels to black, and another fraction of r/2 randomly selected pixels.

3.4 Tool: MATLAB is aMATrix Laboratory. It is an interactive program which provides

numerical computation and visualization of data. With the help of its programming capabilities it
provides tool which is very useful for all areas of science and engineering.
 
Image Processing Toolbox provides a comprehensive set of reference-standard algorithms,
functions, and apps for image processing, analysis, visualization, and algorithm development.
You can perform image enhancement, image deblurring, feature detection, noise reduction,
image segmentation, geometric transformations, and image registration. Many toolbox functions
are multithreaded to take advantage of multicore and multiprocessor computers.

Image Processing Toolbox chains a various set of image and their types, together with high
forceful range, embedded ICC profile, topographic andgigapixel resolution. Visualization
functions permit you searches an image, inspect a region of pixels, create histograms, adjust the
contrast and influence regions of interest (ROIs). With toolbox algorithms you can restore ruined
images, explore shapes, analyze textures, adjust color balance and detect and measure features,.

Image Processing Toolbox is included in MATLAB and Simulink Student Version. Its key
features as follows:
 Importing and Exporting Images
 Displaying and Exploring Images
 Post processing Images and Preprocessing
 Analyzing Images
 Image Registration and Geometric Transformations

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 Working with Large Images

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REFERENCES

[1] Kashyap, Nikita, and G. R. Sinha. "Image watermarking using 3-level discrete wavelet
transform (DWT)." International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science
(IJMECS) 4.3 (2012): 50.
[2] Lu, Chun-Shien, and H-YM Liao. "Multipurpose watermarking for image authentication and
protection." Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on 10, no. 10 (2001): 1579-1592.
[3] Martin, Alberto, and Sabri Tosunoglu. "Image processing techniques for machine vision."
Miami, Florida (2000).
[4] Chaturvedi, Navnidhi, and S. J. Basha. "Comparison of Digital Image watermarking Methods
DWT & DWT-DCT on the Basis of PSNR." image 2 (2012): 1.
[5] Al-Haj, Ali. "Combined DWT-DCT digital image watermarking." Journal of computer
science 3, no. 9 (2007): 740.
[6] Singh, Surya Pratap, Paresh Rawat, and Sudhir Agrawal. "A robust watermarking approach
using DCT-DWT." International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
(ISSN 2250-2459, Volume 2, Issue 8 (2012).
[7] Mansouri, A., A. Mahmoudi Aznaveh, and F. Torkamani Azar. "SVD-based digital image
watermarking using complex wavelet transform." Sadhana 34, no. 3 (2009): 393-406.
[8] Anthony T.S.Ho et.al, “A Robust Digital Image-in-Image Watermarking Algorithm Using
the Fast Hadamard Transform”, Springer, 2011
[9] Alexander Sverdlov, “Secure DCT-SVD Domain Image Watermarking: Embedding Data in
All Frequencies”, Proceedings of IEEE Region 10 Technical Conference on Convergent
Technologies for the Asia-Pacific, Bangalore, India, October 14-17, 2003
[10] T. Serre, L. Wolf, S. Bileschi, M. Riesenhuber, and T. Poggio, “Object recognition with
cortex-like mechanisms,” IEEE Trans. on PAMI vol. 29, no. 3, 2007.
[11] J.-K. Kamarainen, V. Kyrki, and H. K ¨ alvi¨ ainen, “Invariance properties of Gabor filter
based features - overview and applications,” IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, vol. 15, no. 5,
pp. 1088–1099, 2006.
[12] D. Gabor, “Theory of communication,” Journal of Institution of Electrical Engineers, vol.
93, pp. 429–457, 1946.

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