MINOR PROJECT SYNOPSIS

On

“Digital Watermarking Using DCT​”

Submitted to Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi (India)

in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of the degree of

B.TECH
IN
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi

Submitted By:
Mohit Kukreja(60196303115)
Arun Kumar (60296303115)
Vipul Kumar
(60396303115)

August-November 2018
MAHARAJA SURAJMAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
 C-4, Janak Puri, New Delhi-110058
Digital Watermarking Using DCT

INTRODUCTION

Watermark is a recognizable image or pattern in paper used to identify authenticity. Digital

watermarking is the process of embedding information into a digital signal in a way that is
difficult to remove. The signal may be audio, pictures or video. It is the process by which
identifying data is woven into media content such as images, movies, music or programming,
giving those objects a unique, digital identity that can be used for a variety of valuable
applications. Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognized by special software
detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and
editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption, and broadcast — without
affecting the quality of the content.

NEED FOR WATERMARKING

The piracy of software, images, video, audio, and the text has long been a concern for owners
of these digital assets. Protection schemes are usually based upon the insertion of digital
watermarks into the data. The watermarking software introduces small errors into the object
being watermarked. These intentional errors are called marks, and all the marks together
constitute the watermark. The marks are chosen so as to have an insignificant impact on the
usefulness of the data and are placed in such a way that a malicious user cannot destroy them
without making the data significantly less useful.

APPLICATIONS
Digital Watermarking can be used for a wide range of applications such as:
● Copyright protection
● Source Tracking (Different recipients get differently watermarked content)
● Broadcast Monitoring (Television news often contains watermarked video from
international agencies)
● Covert Communication

Literature Survey

[1] ​Maheshwari et al. 2015 provide Digital Image Watermarking based on DCT based
pyramid transform with malicious JPEG compression attack. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is
computed to measure image quality for a proposed technique for better results as compared to
previous techniques of information hiding.

[2] ​Mathur and Mathuria 2017 provided a complete study on LSB and DCT. In this research
paper, they compared both LSB and DCT to find the best digital watermarking technique to
highly secure digital image form the illegal copies. They also analyzed the possibilities of
dual watermarking.

[3] ​Parah et al. 2016 proposed a robust blind watermarking technique, based on block-based
DCT coefficient modification. The difference between two DCT coefficients of the adjacent
blocks at the same position is calculated. Depending upon the watermark bit to be embedded.
He also examined the robustness of the proposed scheme for various singular and hybrid
attacks.

[4] ​Bansal et al. 2015 provide results of watermarking done by using LSB technique, DCT
transform and DWT transform and are compared on the basis of peak signal to noise ratio
(PSNR) and normalized correlation (NC).

[5] ​Li et al. 2017 provide a new method that simplifies the previous DCT-based methods
while more robust to common attacks than conventional methods. M*N block is used in this
algorithm rather than conventional 8*8 block technique. It is showed that it is robust to kinds
of common piracy attacks. Also, extraction of a watermark can be done just by subtracting
the watermarked image with the original image to get the watermark.

[6] ​Abraham and Paul 2014 proposed algorithm that ensures a higher visual quality after
watermark addition by enforcing watermark only in safer portions. Blocks or pixel regions
selected for watermark hiding are such regions in the image where modifications are least
noticeable by human eyes by using DCT.

Findings from paper

● Digital Watermarking is a method by which data can be secured by hiding data in an

image which can work as a carrier image. Watermarking is an interactive method to
protect and identify the digital data.
● DCT transform is more robust than the LSB technique because DCT’s noise
immunity is more than that of LSB. It found that the DCT transform is the best
technique for digital watermarking among LSB, DWT, and DCT as it is complex
watermarking which is robust to face different types of attack.
● An image can be watermarked by DCT using M*N blocks rather than 8*8 blocks
technique to make it more robust and less prone to attacks. This also made resist the
image zoom in, zoom out and height-width ratio change attack.
● DCT transform can be used to decompose the image into various frequency bands.
Human eyes are insensitive to changes in certain portions in the images. These
portions can be computed by performing blockwise on the entire image and this can
be done by DCT transform by decomposing it. This method can survive even after
four bits on the least significant aide of all pixels in the image was reset.
Problem Statement

Watermarking was proposed to resolve illegal duplication of images without the consent of
owner ​so that a watermark is hidden in the image as a token of ownership. But the intelligent
attacker performed various attacks on the image to destroy the watermark without harming
the image much. For eg, by changing the height and width of the image can destroy
watermark. By this, digital media can be copied, redistributed, and manipulated.

A very unsolvable problem is still there is no appropriate method for image security to
identify ownership with the image sharing tool over the internet. The digital image
watermarking is still appreciable and demandable techniques. There is a need for a robust
algorithm which resists various attacks like JPEG Compression, Addition of Noise and
Cropping attack.

Objective

● Study different research papers on the implementation of watermarking and discrete

cosine transform (DCT).
● To construct the method for implementation based on the findings from the research
papers and design an algorithm.
● To construct a robust algorithm using the DCT transform.
● Encode watermark in such regions in the image where modifications are least
noticeable by human eyes.
● Compare the result of all possible methods of watermarking techniques and suggest a
robust watermarking technique.

Proposed Solution

● Use of M*N block technique in DCT to embed a digital watermark in a given image
to withstand attacks
● Use of DCT technique in such regions which are least visible to human eyes which
will help in maintaining the quality of the image.
● Create an efficient watermarking embedding and extraction algorithm using DCT
transform

Hardware Requirements

● Processor: Intel Celeron family and above

● OS: Windows 7 and above/ Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
● Graphics: Dedicated Graphics
 ● 16 GB available disk space(32-bit) or 20GB(64-bit) - just for the OS, not applications
or data files.
● 2 GB RAM (32-bit) or 4 GB RAM (64-bit)

Software Requirements

● Sublime Text
● Required libraries
● MATLAB

Time plan

Timeline Action

1​st​ Aug – 15​th​ Aug Exclusive and extensive study of related paper.

Looking into the best possible solutions to the problem.

th​ th​
16​ Aug – 31​ Aug

Devising a technique against maximum attacks.

st​ th​
1​ Sep– 15​ Sep

Implementation of proposed techniques.

th​ th​
16​ Sep – 30​ Sep

Finalization of the project.

st​ th​
1​ Sep– 15​ Sep

16​th​ Sep – 30​th​ Sep Compilation of project report.

References

[1] ​J. P. Maheshwari, M. Kumar, G. Mathur, R. P. Yadav, and R. K. Kakerda, “Robust

Digital Image Watermarking using DCT based pyramid transform via image
compression,” in ​2015 International Conference on Communications and Signal
Processing (ICCSP)​, 2015, pp. 1059–1063.

[2] E. Mathur and M. Mathuria, “Unbreakable digital watermarking using combination of

LSB and DCT,” in ​2017 International conference of Electronics, Communication and
Aerospace Technology (ICECA),​ 2017, vol. 2, pp. 351–354.

[3] S. A. Parah, J. A. Sheikh, N. A. Loan, and G. M. Bhat, “Robust and blind watermarking
technique in DCT domain using inter-block coefficient differencing,” ​Digit. Signal
Process.,​ vol. 53, pp. 11–24, Jun. 2016.

[4] N. Bansal, V. K. Deolia, A. Bansal, and P. Pathak, “Comparative analysis of LSB, DCT
and DWT for Digital Watermarking,” in ​2015 2nd International Conference on
Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom),​ 2015, pp. 40–45.

[5] J. Abraham and V. Paul, “Image watermarking using DCT in selected pixel regions,” in
2014 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Communication and
Computational Technologies (ICCICCT),​ 2014, pp. 398–402.

[6] X. Li, X. Wang, A. Chen, and L. Xiao, “A Simplified and Robust DCT-based
Watermarking Algorithm,” in ​2017 2nd International Conference on Multimedia and
Image Processing (ICMIP),​ 2017, pp. 167–171.