Because of an increasing number of security cameras, it is crucial to establish a system that protects the privacy of objects in the recorded images. To this end, we propose a framework of image processing and data hiding for security monitoring and privacy protection. First, we state the requirements of the proposed monitoring systems and suggest possible implementation that satisfies those requirements. The underlying concept of our proposed framework is as follows: (1) in the recorded images, the objects whose privacy should be protected are deteriorated by appropriate image processing; (2) the original objects are encrypted and watermarked into the output image, which is encoded using an image compression standard; (3) real-time processing is performed such that no future frame is required to generate on output bitstream. It should be noted that in this framework, anyone can observe the decoded image that includes the deteriorated objects that are unrecognizable or invisible. On the other hand, for crime investigation, this system allows a limited number of users to observe the original objects by using a special viewer that decrypts and decodes the watermarked objects with a decoding password. Moreover, the special viewer allows us to select the objects to be decoded and displayed. We provide an implementation example, experimental results, and performance evaluations to support our proposed framework.

In this letter we propose a robust detection algorithm for audio watermarking for copyright protection. The watermark is embedded in the time domain of an audio signal by the normally used spread spectrum technique. The scheme of detection is an improvement of the conventional correlation detector. A high-pass filter is applied along with the linear prediction error filter for whitening the audio signal and an adaptive threshold is chosen for decision comparing. Experimental results show that our detection algorithm outperforms the conventional one not only because it improves the robustness to normal attacks but also because it can provide the robustness to time-invariant pitch-scale modification.

For the digital watermarking patchwork algorithm originally given by Bender et al., this paper proposes two improvements applicable to audio watermarking. First, the watermark embedding strength is psychoacoustically adapted, using the Bark frequency scale. Second, whereas previous approaches leave the samples that do not correspond to the data untouched, in this paper, these are modified to reduce the probability of misdetection, a method called full index embedding. In simulations, the proposed combination of these two proposed methods has higher resistance to a variety of attacks than prior algorithms.

Data transmission via audio link on AM radio system is shown to be achievable by using Acoustic OFDM. We employ Acoustic OFDM to embed data onto audio contents that are then broadcast as AM radio signals. We tuned the parameters, and performed experiments. Text data as URL can be delivered to mobile phone through existing MF AM radio system and radios.

This paper proposes a novel MP3 watermarking method which is applicable to a mobile terminal with limited computational resources. Considering that in most cases the embedded information is copyright information or metadata, which should be extracted before playing back audio contents, the watermark detection process should be executed at high speed. However, when conventional methods are used with a mobile terminal, it takes a considerable amount of time to detect a digital watermark. This paper focuses on scalefactor manipulation to enable high speed watermark embedding/detection for MP3 audio and also proposes the manipulation method which minimizes audio quality degradation adaptively. Evaluation tests showed that the proposed method is capable of embedding 3 bits/frame information without degrading audio quality and detecting it at very high speed. Finally, this paper describes application examples for authentication with a digital signature.

This letter presents a novel robust video watermarking scheme based on space-time interest points. These points correspond to inherent structures of the video so that they can be used as synchronization signals for watermark embedding and extraction. In the proposed scheme, local regions are generated using the space-time interest points, and the watermark is embedded into all the regions by quantization. It is a blind scheme and the watermark can be extracted from any position of the video. Experimental results show that the watermark is invisible and it can robustly survive traditional signal processing attacks and video-oriented attacks.

Robustness and invisibility are two contrary constraints for robust invisible watermarking. Instead of the conventional strategy with human visual system (HVS) model, this paper presents a content-adaptive approach to further optimize the constraint between them. To reach this target, the entropy-based and integrated HVS (IHVS) based measures are constructed so as to adaptively choose the suitable components for watermark insertion and detection. Such a kind of scheme potentially gives rise to synchronization problem between the encoder and decoder under the framework of blind watermarking, which is then solved by incorporating the repeat-accumulate (RA) code with erasure and error correction. Moreover, a new hidden Markov model (HMM) based detector in wavelet domain is introduced to reduce the computation complexity and is further developed into a posterior one to avoid the transmission of HMM parameters with only a little sacrifice of detection performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain considerable improvement in robustness performance with the same distortion as the traditional one.

This work addresses the issue on the robustness performance in M-ary quantization watermarking. If the encoded messages are arranged in the order of Gray Code such that adjacent messages differ at only one bit, this work demonstrates the robustness will be substantially improved in low DNR scenarios. Furthermore, the two-bit quantization watermarking can outperform the LUT approach which also provides the robustness improvement in the high-noisy environments.

Wavelet tree based watermarking algorithms are using the wavelet coefficient energy difference for copyright protection and ownership verification. WTQ (Wavelet Tree Quantization) algorithm is the representative technique using energy difference for watermarking. According to the cryptanalysis on WTQ, the watermark embedded in the protected image can be removed successfully. In this paper, we present a novel differential energy watermarking algorithm based on the wavelet tree group modulation structure, i.e. WTGM (Wavelet Tree Group Modulation). The wavelet coefficients of host image are divided into disjoint super trees (each super tree containing two sub-super trees). The watermark is embedded in the relatively high-frequency components using the group strategy such that energies of sub-super trees are close. The employment of wavelet tree structure, sum-of-subsets and positive/negative modulation effectively improve the drawbacks of the WTQ scheme for its insecurity. The integration of the HVS (Human Visual System) for WTGM provides a better visual effect of the watermarked image. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in terms of robustness and imperceptibility.

This paper is to propose a digital watermarking to protect the ownership of a video content which is compressed by H.264/AVC main profile. This scheme intends to be performed during the CABAC (Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) process which is the entropy coding of the main profile. It uses the contexts extracted during the context modeling process of CABAC to position the watermark bits by simply checking the context values and determining the coefficients. The watermarking process is also as simple as replacing the watermark bit with the LSB (Least Significant Bit) of the corresponding coefficient to be watermarked. Experimental results from applying this scheme and attacking in various ways such as blurring, sharpening, cropping, Gaussian noise addition, and geometrical modification showed that the watermark embedded by this scheme has very high imperceptibility and robustness to the attacks. Thus, we expect it to be used as a good watermarking scheme, especially in the area that the watermarking should be performed during the compression process with requiring minimal amount of process for watermarking.

We present a robust object-based watermarking algorithm using the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) in conjunction with a data embedding method based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The message is embedded in the DCT domain of randomly generated blocks in the selected object region. To recognize the object region after being distorted, its SIFT features are registered in advance. In the detection scheme, we extract SIFT features from the distorted image and match them with the registered ones. Then we recover the distorted object region based on the transformation parameters obtained from the matching result using SIFT, and the watermarked message can be detected. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed algorithm is very robust to distortions such as JPEG compression, scaling, rotation, shearing, aspect ratio change, and image filtering.

In this letter, we propose a simple reversible watermarking method for JPEG images using the characteristics of JPEG compression. The method embeds a watermark into a JPEG image, and it extracts the watermark from the watermarked JPEG image and at the same time can recover the watermarked JPEG image to an original unwatermarked JPEG image. Moreover we investigate the number of embeddable blocks, the quality of watermarked images, and the increase of file-size by embedding a watermark.

This paper presents a watermarking method for the copyright protection and the prevention of illegal copying of mobile 3D contents. The proposed method embeds the copyright information and user's phone number into the spatial and encryption domains of the mobile animation data using the Buyer-Seller watermarking protocol. In addition, a user operation key is also inserted, so only the authorized user can play the 3D animation game on the mobile device. The proposed method was implemented using a mobile animation tool, and experimental results verified that the proposed method was capable of copyright protection and preventing illegal copying, as the watermarks were also accurately extracted in the case of geometrical attacks, such as noise addition, data accuracy variation, and data up/down scaling.

In this study, we propose a complete architecture based on digital watermarking techniques to solve the issue of copyright protection and authentication for digital contents. We apply visible and semi-fragile watermarks as dual watermarks where visible watermarking is used to establish the copyright protection and semi-fragile watermarking authenticates and verifies the integrity of the watermarked image. In order to get the best tradeoff between the embedding energy of watermark and the perceptual translucence for visible watermark, the composite coefficients using global and local characteristics of the host and watermark images in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain is considered with Human Vision System (HVS) models. To achieve the optimum noise reduction of the visibility thresholds for HVS in DWT domain, the contrast-sensitive function (CSF) and noise visible function (NVF) of perceptual model is applied which characterizes the global and local image properties and identifies texture and edge regions to determine the optimal watermark locations and strength at the watermark embedding stage. In addition, the perceptual weights according to the basis function amplitudes of DWT coefficients is fine tuned for the best quality of perceptual translucence in the design of the proposed watermarking algorithm. Furthermore, the semi-fragile watermark can detect and localize malicious attack effectively yet tolerate mild modifications such as JPEG compression and channel additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). From the experimental results, our proposed technique not only improves the PSNR values and visual quality than other algorithms but also preserves the visibility of the watermark visible under various signal processing and advanced image recovery attacks.

A new method of multi-bit embedding based on a protocol of secure asymmetric digital watermarking detection is proposed. Secure watermark detection has been achieved by means of allowing watermark verifier to detect a message without any secret information exposed in extraction process. Our methodology is based on an asymmetric property of a watermark algorithm which hybridizes a statistical watermark algorithm and a public-key algorithm. In 2004, Furukawa proposed a secure watermark detection scheme using patchwork watermarking and Paillier encryption, but the feasibility had not tested in his work. We have examined it and have shown that it has a drawback in heavy overhead in processing time. We overcome the issue by replacing the cryptosystem with the modified El Gamal encryption and improve performance in processing time. We have developed software implementation for both methods and have measured effective performance. The obtained result shows that the performance of our method is better than Frukawa's method under most of practical conditions. In our method, multiple bits can be embedded by assigning distinct generators in each bit, while the embedding algorithm of Frukawa's method assumes a single-bit message. This strongly enhances capability of multi-bit information embedding, and also improves communication and computation cost.

Commercial markets employ digital right management (DRM) systems to protect valuable high-definition (HD) quality videos. DRM system uses watermarking to provide copyright protection and ownership authentication of multimedia contents. We propose a real-time video watermarking scheme for HD video in the uncompressed domain. Especially, our approach is in aspect of practical perspectives to satisfy perceptual quality, real-time processing, and robustness requirements. We simplify and optimize human visual system mask for real-time performance and also apply dithering technique for invisibility. Extensive experiments are performed to prove that the proposed scheme satisfies the invisibility, real-time processing, and robustness requirements against video processing attacks. We concentrate upon video processing attacks that commonly occur in HD quality videos to display on portable devices. These attacks include not only scaling and low bit-rate encoding, but also malicious attacks such as format conversion and frame rate change.

This paper presents an algorithm for the robust watermarking of 3D polygonal mesh models. The proposed algorithm embeds the watermark into a 2D image extracted from the 3D model, rather than directly embedding it into 3D geometry. The proposed embedding domain, i.e., the 2D image, is devised to be robust against the attacks like mesh simplification which severely modifies the vertices and connectivity while preserving the appearance of the model. The watermark-embedded model is obtained by using a simple vertex perturbation algorithm without iterative optimization. Two exemplary watermark applications using the proposed methods are also presented: one is to embed several bits into 3D models and the other is to detect only the existence of a watermark. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust against similarity transform, mesh simplification, additive Gaussian noise, quantization of vertex coordinates and mesh smoothing, and that its computational complexity is lower than that of the conventional methods.

The letter proposes a novel subsampling-based digital image watermarking scheme resisting the permutation attack. The subsampling-based watermarking schemes have drawn great attention for their convenience and effectiveness in recent years, but the traditional subsampling-based watermarking schemes are very vulnerable to the permutation attack. In this letter, the watermark information is embedded in the average values of the 1-level DWT coefficients to resist the permutation attack. The concrete embedding process is achieved by the quantization-based method. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist not only the permutation attack but also some common image processing attacks.

We present a watermarking scheme that combines data compression and encryption in application to radiological medical images. In this approach we combine the image moment theory and image homogeneity in order to recover the watermark after a geometrical distortion. Image quality is measured with metrics used in image processing, such as PSNR and MSE.

Self embedding watermarking is a technique used for tamper detection, localization and recovery. This letter proposes a novel self embedding scheme, in which the halftone version of the host image is exploited as a watermark, instead of a JPEG-compressed version used in most existing methods. Our scheme employs a pixel-wise permuted and embedded mechanism and thus overcomes some common drawbacks of the previous methods. Experimental results demonstrate our technique is effective and practical.