DIGITAL WATERMARKING

Digital watermarking is the process of embedding information into digital multimedia content
such that the information (which we call the watermark) can later be extracted or detected for a
variety of purposes. Digital watermarking is the process of making small adjustments to the host
signal, in such a way that these adjustments cannot be perceived by humans. These small
changes represent in some way the information one wishes to hide. The changes are called the
watermark. The host signal together with the watermark adjustments is called the watermarked
signal. If the host signal is represented by x and the watermarked signal by y, then the
watermark, represented by w, is defined as w , y í x, i.e., the difference between the
watermarked and the host signal.

GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR WATERMARKING

Watermarking is the process that embeds data called a watermark or digital signature or tag or
label into a multimedia object such that watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an
assertion about the object. The object may be an image or audio or video. A simple example of
a digital watermark would be a visible seal placed over an image to identify the copyright.
However the watermark might contain additional information including the identity of the
purchaser of a particular copy of the material.

In general, any watermarking scheme (algorithm) consists of three parts.

The watermark.
The encoder (insertion algorithm).
The decoder and comparator (detection algorithm).
Each owner has a unique watermark or an owner can also put different watermarks in different
objects the marking algorithm incorporates the watermark into the object. The verification
algorithm authenticates the object determining both the owner and the integrity of the object.

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EMBEDDINGG PROCESS
The process of watermarking a host signal is usually referred to as embedding a
message in the host signal. Let us denote an image by a signature by S and the watermarked
image by I. E is an embedding function, it takes an image I and a signature S, and it generates a
new image which is called watermarked image.

EXTRACTION PROCESS
The process of reading the message at the receiver side is usually referred to as
detecting a message from the received signal. A extraction function D takes an image J
whose ownership is to be determined and recovers a signature from the image. In this process an
additional image I can also be included which is often the original and unwatermarked version of
J. This is due to the fact that some encoding schemes may make use of the original images in the
watermarking process to provide extra robustness against intentional and unintentional
corruption of pixels. The extracted signature will then be compared with the owner signature
sequence by a comparator function and a binary output decision generated. It is 1 if there is
match and 0 otherwise.

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TYPES OF DIGITAL WATERMARKS
Watermarks and watermarking techniques can be divided into various categories in various
ways. The watermarks can be applied in spatial domain. An alternative to spatial domain
watermarking is frequency domain watermarking. It has been pointed out that the frequency
domain methods are more robust than the spatial domain techniques. Different types of
watermarks are shown in the figure below

Watermarking techniques can be divided into four categories according to the type of document
to be watermarked as follows.
· Image Watermarking
· Video Watermarking
· Audio Watermarking
· Text Watermarking
According to the human perception, the digital watermarks can be divide into three different
types as follows.
· Visible watermark
· Invisible-Robust watermark
· Invisible-Fragile watermark

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In visible watermarking, the information is visible in the picture or video. Typically, the
information is text or a logo which identifies the owner of the media. The image on the right has
a visible watermark. When a television broadcaster adds its logo to the corner of transmitted
video, this is also a visible watermark.

In invisible watermarking, information is added as digital data to audio, picture or video, but it
cannot be perceived. The invisible-robust watermark is embed in such a way that an alternation
made to the pixel value is perceptually not noticed and it can be recovered only with appropriate
decoding mechanism. The invisible-fragile watermark is embedded in such a way that any
manipulation or modification of the image would alter or destroy the watermark.

Properties of Watermarks

There are a number of measurable characteristics that a watermark should exhibit. These include
that it should be difficult to notice, robust to common distortions of the signal, resistant to
malicious attempts to remove the watermark, support a sufficient data rate commensurate with
these application, allow multiple watermarks to be added and that the decoder be scalable.

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The watermark should not be noticeable to the viewer, nor should then watermark degrade the
quality of the original image. However, if a signal is truly imperceptible, then perceptually based
lossy compression algorithms probably, still leave room for an imperceptible signal to be
inserted. This may not be true for the next generation compression algorithms. Thus, to survive
the next generation of lossy compression algorithms, it will probably be necessary for a
watermark to be noticeable to a trained observer.

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The watermark must be difficult to remove. If only partial knowledge is available (e.g. the exact
location of the watermark in an image is unknown) then attempts to remove or destroy a
watermark, should result in severe degradation in fidelity before the watermark is lost.

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The same digital watermarking algorithm should apply to all the three media under
considerations. This is potentially helpful in the watermarking of multimedia products. Also, this
feature is conductive to the implementation of audio and image/video watermarking algorithms
on common hardware.


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The watermark retrieval should unambiguously identify the owner. Furthermore, the accuracy of
owner identification should degrade gracefully in the face of attack. In addition, the watermark
procedure also ensures low false positive and low false negative detections.c

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It means the watermarking detector detects the presence of a watermark, even though it is not
present. This should be as low as possible for a good watermarking technique.

Applications of Digital Watermarking

Digital watermarking techniques have wide ranging applications. Some of the applications are
enlisted below.
‡ u
c · Digital watermarks can be used to identify and protect copyright
ownership. Digital content can be embedded with watermarks depicting metadata identifying the
copyright owners.
‡ u
c · Digital content can be watermarked to indicate that the content cannot be
illegally replicated. Devices capable of replication can then detect such watermarks and prevent
unauthorized replication of the content.
‡ · Digital watermarks can be used to track the usage of digital content. Each copy of
digital content can be uniquely watermarked with metadata specifying the authorized users of the
content. Such watermarks can be used to detect illegal replication of content by identifying the
users who replicated the content illegally. The watermarking technique used for tracking is called
as À


.
‡ 
c · Digital watermarks, which are fragile in nature, can be used for tamper
proofing. Digital content can be embedded with fragile watermarks that get destroyed whenever
any sort of modification is made to the content. Such watermarks can be used to authenticate the
content.

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‡ Gc · Digital watermarks can be used to monitor broadcasted content like
television and broadcast radio signals. Advertising companies can use systems that can detect the
broadcast of advertisements for billing purposes by identifying the watermarks broadcast along
with the content.c
Attacks on watermarking systems :
The different types of watermarking systems include common signalprocessing, geometric and
other intentional attacks.

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The marketed image may undergo several filtering operations in the course of enhancement
techniques. Such filtering operations include low pass, high pass, median or Gaussian filtering.
It is absolutely necessary for the watermarked information to be resistant to all such filtering
processes.

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The watermark is also prone to be distorted or lost while the marketed image is rescaled.

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A common editing operation is the spatial rejection of a portion of the marketed image. Such an
operation is also considered to be a serious threat to the watermarked information. This is a very
important consideration when the watermarking is done in the spatial domain. This requires the
watermarked information to be embedded in those areas of the original image which are
significant, and if cropped away results in severe degradation of the actual image.

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A simple and yet devastating attack on the watermark is to add a bit of jitter to the signal. In
cases where the lower order bits are used to carry the watermark information, such an attack can
totally destroy the hidden data.

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-ISIBLE WATERMARKING

Visible watermarking is a type of digital watermarking used for protection of publicly available
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  cVisible watermarking has
been more popular in the case of protecting digital images due to the fact that it allows users to
easily identify their content due to the property of the scheme without the need for an explicit
extractor. This also allows owners to deter the unauthorized usage of their images.[6]
The main advantage of using a visible watermark is that they convey an immediate claim of
ownership, providing credit to the owner. It also prevents or at least discourages, unauthorized
use of copyrighted high quality images. Such deterrence is considered useful which is evidenced
by the common practice of the use of a visible watermark in television broadcasting where the
channel logo is translucently placed at the corner of the screen image. It also serves the dual
purpose of providing a recognizable identity to the content. copyrighted high quality images [5].

xc The ease of adding a visible watermark to an image often makes it a palatable option.

xc This type of watermarks is easily viewable without any mathematical calculation but
these embedded watermarks can be destroyed easily.

xc Adding an invisible watermark to an image is often much more complicated than adding
a visible watermark, although a number of available software packages perform the
necessary operations automatically.

xc nly visible watermarking will not with stand general image processing attacks
(particularly watermark is completely removed by cropping the visible information). In
such cases spreading the visible watermark all over the original image solves the above
problem.

Three major requirements for visible watermarking:

1. Visibility· The watermark must be easily identified.

2. Transparency· The watermark must not significantly obscure the image details beneath it.

3. Robustness· The original pixels in the watermarked areas should not be easily recovered

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 Characteristics of visible watermarks:

xc A visible watermark should be obvious in both color and monochrome images.

xc The watermark should be spread in a large or important area of the image in order to
prevent its deletion by clipping. The watermark should be visible yet must not
significantly obscure the image details beneath it.

xc The watermark must be difficult to remove; removing a watermark should be more costly
and labor intensive than purchasing the image from the owner.

xc The watermark should be applied automatically with little human intervention and labor.

Visible watermarks can be used in following cases·

visible watermarking for enhanced copyright protection. In such situations, where images are
made available through Internet and the content owner is concerned that the images will be used
commercially (e.g. imprinting coffee mugs) without payment of royalties. Here the content
owner desires an ownership mark, that is visually apparent, but which does not prevent image
being used for other purposes.
· visible watermarking used to indicate ownership originals. In this case images are made
available through the Internet and the content owner desires to indicate the ownership of the
underlying materials (library manuscript), so an observer might be encouraged to patronize the
institutions that own the material.

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