Design and implementation of a watermarking method using perceptually important sub-image

Nguyen Ngoc Minh

Department of Electronic Engineering Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology Hanoi, Vietnam Email: minhnn@ptit.edu.vn
Abstract This paper presents a design and implementation of a watermarking method in digital images to ensure the imperceptible characteristics of the watermarks, reducing the effects on images quality while maintaining recoverability. The proposed method is performed by embedding watermarks in a perceptually sub-image inside original image. The sub-image is identified as the most significant region of the original image and any attacks to that region to remove watermark will easily reduce the perceptually quality and value of the image. The system is designed using VHDL and implemented in Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. Detailed implementation and testing results are also described in the paper. Keywords watermarking; Virtex; FPGA; VHDL

Nguyen Le Cuong
Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications Electric Power University Hanoi, Vietnam Email: cuongnl@epu.edu.vn

Low frequency Medium frequency

High frequency

Fig. 1. Frequency regions in DCT coefficients matrix

I.

INTRODUCTION

Watermarking is a method to hide information within an object. However, the information is not only hidden, but also integrated with the object. When using digital watermarking, watermark is usually embedded within multimedia information itself. Digital watermarking is widely used in various fields such as signal processing, communication, cryptography. One of the most popular uses of digital watermarking is to hide information within an image. By embedding a watermark within an image, information can be hidden without imperceptibility from others. It also maintains the visual perception and image quality. Among watermarking methods, embedding watermarks to original pictures in DCT domain is the one of the most widespread methods. The original image is divided into regions of 8x8 pixel blocks and their DCT coefficients are also divided into different sections with following characteristics [1], [2], [3]. Low frequency region: this region holds high energy, contains most of the vital information (human eyes are most sensitive in this region). Medium frequency region: this region does not contain crucial image information; likewise it is not a destination for the lossy compression method. High frequency region: this region is a target for lossy compression method.

DC coefficient and low frequency DCT matrix components will decide the perceptual characteristics of images. Therefore, watermark DCT matrix coefficients are usually embedded into the original images DCT (medium or low frequency regions) matrix coefficients in order to achieve strong imperceptible watermarks while still maintain the visual quality. There are also several algorithms to enhance embedded watermarks to increases robustness and imperceptibility of watermarks [4], [5], [6]. Most of the methods try to enhance watermarks based on technically quantitative information about image data in DCT domain. In this paper, an implementation of watermarking is not in entire image, but only in the most eye-sensitive subimage. By using a sub-image, watermarks will be more difficult to be detected and image quality can easily be degraded if being attacked. This method is implemented using VHDL language and then synthesize into a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA. The paper is structured in the following order. Section II introduces some general theory of image adaptive watermarking method that would be used. Section III describes the design and implementation of the watermarking method. Section IV highlights results as well as the necessary discussion. Section V concludes the paper. II. BASIC THEORY

To identify the most eye-sensitive sub-image, influencing characteristics of the Human Visual System (HVS) has to be considered. Several metrics has been determined to identify a perceptually eye-sensitive sub-image inside an image [7].

In [8], to identify a sub-image Si from an image I the original image can be divided into blocks of 8x8. If a subimage is containing N contiguous blocks then the a window with size x shall slide the whole original image. From each windows, a quantitative measurement m of perceptual significant of each sub-image. The quantitative measurement will include several attributes such as intensity, contrast, location, edginess and texture. Intensity Generally, sub-images which are close to mid-intensity of the original image are more sensitive than the others [9]. Hence intensity metric can be calculated as follow:
I ( S i ) = AI ( S i ) MI ( I )

1 N 1 ci , j ,k N k =1 63 i j E ( Si ) = 1 N 1 max N k =1 63 i j ci , j ,k sub images

(4) where ci,j,k is AC coefficients of a sub-image in DCT domain, 1 N 1 k= 1 i j ci , j ,k max is the N 63 sub images maximum value of the means of absolutes of AC coefficients for all sub-images in the original images. Texture A block with highly texture is less sensitive to noise hence less noticeable when modified [7]. To identify the texture metric of a sub-image, the following equation is used:

(1)

where: AI(Si) is the average luminance of sub-image Si, MI(I) is the average luminance of original image I. This intensity metric will quantify the perceptual significance of the sub-image related to the original image. Contrast In an image, a region is more perceptually attracted than surrounding area if the differential contrast level are significant [10]. To identify a contrast metric, the following equation is used:
C ( S i ) = AI ( S i ) AI ( S i surround )

T ( Si ) =

1 N 1 ci , j ,k ACk N k =1 63 i j

)2

(5)

where ci,j,k is AC coefficients of a sub-image in DCT domain, is their mean. Overall quantitative measurement The overall quantitative perceptual measurement of a subimage will be calculated as follows:
m( S i ) = I ( S i ) 2 + C ( S i ) 2 + L( S i ) 2 + E ( S i ) 2 + T ( S i ) 2

(2) where: AI(Si) is the average luminance of sub-image Si, AI(Sisurround) is the average luminance of surrounding area the subimage. AI(Si-surround) will be calculated for all neighboring subimages. This contrast metric will quantify the perceptual significance of the sub-image related to surrounding subimages. Location When viewing an image, human eyes tend to focus more on the center quarter of the image [10]. Hence this area is more significant than other areas. To quantify the location of a subimage, the following equation is used:

(6)

where I(Si),C(Si),L(Si),E(Si),T(Si)are calculated as described above. When a windows of N pixels sliding the whole original images, m(Si) will be calculated for each sub-image. All the values m(Si) are sorted, the sub-image which have highest m(Si) is considered to be perceptually most significant region of the image. After identifying the perceptually most significant region of the image, watermark will be embedded to that image. The watermark will be embedded in DCT domain. III. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

L( S i ) =

center( S i ) total( Si )

(3)

where : center(Si) is the number of pixels of the sub-images that are inside the center quarter of the original image, total(Si) is the total number of pixels of the sub-images. This location metric will quantify the related location of the sub-image inside the original image. Edginess Edge portion of an image is highly significant since they it is easily compared to other portions [7]. To identify the edginess of a sub-image, the following equation is used:

The above algorithm is already tested using Matlab [8]. Since Matlab is an interpreted environment, this would required a high performance computer with lots of computation. In order to speed up the process, the algorithm will be designed and implemented using FPGA. With a large number of parallel logic gates, an FPGA implementation would accelerate the speed of identifying sub-image and watermarking process. Xilinx Virtex 5 was chosen for the design. The flowchart of the design is presented in Fig. 2 below. Firstly, host image and watermark (a logo) will be transmitted from a PC workstation to FPGA board. Secondly, watermark is transformed to DCT domain. Thirdly, host image is also transformed into DCT domain. From the DCT coefficients of host image, a sub-image which are the perceptually most

significant region will be identified. Fourthly, watermark is embedded in the sub-image is the DCT domain. Finally, watermarked image is re-constructed using IDCT process and then transmitted back to PC workstation. In the design, an embedded processor is used to handle the data communication with PC. The chosen one is MicroBlaze processor since it is a soft processor provided by Xilinx and can be easily integrated into an FPGA SoC system. In this system it acts as an embedded general purpose processor. It duty is to control the flow of data: collecting image data from PC and write data to onboard DRAM for buffering, sending processed data from onboard DRAM buffer back to the PC and also controll other peripherals. The system is designed using VHDL and MicroBlaze IPcore. Then it is synthesized and downloaded into FPGA chip. The result is an SOC chip with all the modules such as memory controller, image processing data, MicroBlaze processor are embedded in Virtex 5 5VSX501136-3. By using this platform, the system can be implemented using only one FPGA chip which can simplify the design of the board.

It can be seen that the perceptually significant sub-image has been identified and the watermark has been recovered. Quantitatively, the above algorithm has been tested with large number of image. The table below is average correlation coefficient between recovered watermarks and original watermarks. It can be seen that JPEG compression attack is less affected. The reason is that the algorithm work in DCT domain. Hence JPEG compression attack will affect the significant subimage less if attackers want to maintain quality of the attacked image.

a.

Original image and original watermark S b-

b.

image identification

c.

Sub-image identification

Fig. 2. Flowchart of watermarking process

IV.

RESULT

The whole design was synthesized. The result is in the table below. It can be seen that the design can be fit into the selected FPGA.
TABLE I. LOGIC UTILIZATION OF THE SYSTEM Device Utilization Summary
Logic Utilization Used Utilization

d.

Attacked watermarked image and recovered watermark Fig. 3. Watermarking results with Lena

Number of Slice Registers Number of Slice LUTs Number used as Logic Number used as Memory

11249 out of 32640 9687 out of 32640 9129 out of 32640 558 out of 12480

34% 29% 27% 4%

Quantitatively, the above algorithm has been tested with large number of image. The table below is average correlation coefficient between recovered watermarks and original watermarks. It can be seen that JPEG compression attack is less affected. The reason is that the algorithm work in DCT domain. Hence JPEG compression attack will affect the significant subimage less if attackers want to maintain quality of the attacked image.
TABLE II. AVERAGE CORRELATION FOR EACH ATTACK TYPE Average correlation Attack type

The system is also tested with Lena image. The attacks including JPEG compression, white noise addition and resizing. The results are shown in Fig. 3.

coefficient JPEG attack Adding noise Resize Rotation 0.81 0.76 0.72 0.73

[3]

V.

CONCLUSION

A design and implementation of a watermarking method using perceptually important sub-image has been presented. The method is performed by embedding watermarks in a perceptually sub-image inside original image instead of the whole original mage. The results show that the method can identify the sub-image and watermark can be recovered after being attacked. The system is implemented as a SOC in FPGA hence it can be reused as an IP core for other hardware implementation. It can also take advantages of hardware processing rather than software processing in a normal computer system. REFERENCES
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