Conventional authentication methods, proposed mainly for gray-scale and color images, are not appropriate for palette images, which usually contain simple contents with a limited number of colors. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to verify the integrity of palette images and to locate tampered regions without re-quantization and re-indexing processes. The proposed approach is based on a combined use of both the fragile watermarking and the digital signature approaches, taking the advantages of both approaches and avoiding their drawbacks. To protect a block of an image, authentication signals are first generated according to a secret key. Based on an embeddability property defined in the study, the pixels of each block are classified as embeddable or non-embeddable. Only the former ones are used to embed the authentication signals. A corresponding digital signature is generated as well to compensate the possibly limited embedding capacity of the embeddable pixels that are insufficient in number. To authenticate a block, the recovered authentication signals, yielded from the extracted watermark and the received digital signature, are compared with the one generated according to the correct secret key, to prove the block's legitimacy. The effectiveness and the security of the proposed method are analyzed and tested with a variety of palette images. The results indicate that the proposed method can offer high authentication accuracy as well as maintain a good tradeoff between the authentication signal portability and the resulting image quality.

A watermarking system is secure as long as it satisfies Kerckhoffs principle according to the cryptography. In this letter, two novel techniques named the encrypted orthogonal transformation and its improved scheme as useful preprocessing methods are presented to apply to the watermarking field, which can enhance the security of the watermarking scheme. Compared to discrete cosine transform watermarking algorithms, this method has similar robustness but higher security.

Although watermarking techniques have been extensively developed for natural videos, little progress is made in the area of graphics animation. Following the former successful MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 coding standards that provide efficient representations of natural videos, the emerging MPEG-4 standard incorporates new coding tools for 2D mesh animation. Graphics animation information is crucial for many applications and may need proper protection. In this paper, we develop a watermarking technique suitable for MPEG-4 2D mesh animation. The proposed method is based on the multiresolution analysis of 2D dynamic mesh. We perform wavelet transform on the temporal sequence of the node points to extract the significant spectral components of mesh movement, which we term the "feature motions. " A binary watermark invisibly resides in the feature motions based on the spread-spectrum principle. Before watermark detection, a spatial-domain least-squares registration technique is used to restore the possibly geometrically distorted mesh data. Each watermark bit is then detected by hard decision with cryptographically secure keys. We have tested the proposed method with a variety of attacks, including affine transformations, temporal smoothing, spectral enhancement and attenuation, additive random noise, and a combination of the above. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarks can withstand the aforementioned attacks.

A novel geometrically invariant watermarking scheme based on gravity center is presented which treating the geometrically invariant gravity centers of host image and its supplement image as reference points. Thus watermark synchronization is obtained. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our scheme to the geometrical distortion including rotation and/or scaling.

Davidson's scheme utilizes the order of basic blocks to embed a digital signature in a computer program. To preserve the function of the original program, additional jump instructions are inserted. This involves some overhead in both size and performance. In our implementation, the increase in size was between 9% and 24%. The performance of benchmark programs was 86-102% of the original.

This paper presents a novel digital image watermarking algorithm based on the labeled bisecting clustering technique. Each cluster is labeled either '0' or '1' based on the labeling key. Each input image block is then assigned to the nearest codeword or cluster centre whose label is equal to the watermark bit. The watermark extraction can be performed blindly. The proposed method is robust to JPEG compression and some spatial-domain processing operations. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

A novel audio watermarking based on wavelet modulation is presented. The watermark signals are constructed by M-band wavelet modulation that can increase redundancy to improve the detection performance. In order to maximize the watermarking strength within the perceptual constraints, the watermark signals synthesized from different subbands are separately masked using a frequency auditory model. CDMA technique is implemented to achieve watermarking capacity. Experimental results show that this method is very robust.

This Letter presents a novel VQ-based digital image watermarking method. By modifying the conventional GLA algorithm, a codeword-labeled codebook is first generated. Each input image block is then reconstructed by the nearest codeword whose label is equal to the watermark bit. The watermark extraction can be performed blindly. Simulation results show that the proposed method is robust to JPEG compression, vector quantization (VQ) compression and some spatial-domain processing operations.

A good watermark is known to be perceptually invisible, undetectable without key and robust to spatial/temporal data modification. In this paper, we utilize the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) for watermarking. In HVS, the response of visual cortex decomposes the image spectra into perceptual channels that are octave bands in spatial frequency. Based on the octave-bands division, same numbers of bits of the watermark are inserted into each channel. Experimental results show that the proposed method based on HVS method gives strong robustness to the attacks compared with conventional DCT, wavelet and DFT watermarking methods.

In digital content distribution systems, digital watermarking (fingerprinting) technique provides a good solution to avoid illegal copying and has been studied very actively. c-Secure CRT Code is one of the most practical ID coding schemes for such fingerprinting since it is secure against collusion attacks and also secure even though random errors are furthermore added. But its usefulness is decreased in the case that random errors are added because the code length will be longer. In this paper, a new collusion attack with addition of random errors is introduced and show that c-Secure CRT Code is not sufficiently secure against the attack at first. Next, we analyze the problem and propose a new ID coding scheme, Randomized c-Secure CRT Code which overcomes the problem. As a result, this new scheme improves the error tracing probabilities against the proposed attack drastically. This new scheme has the same code length, so this is one of the most responsible fingerprinting codes for content distribution systems.

This paper presents an image watermarking method for two purposes: to notify the copyright owner with a visible watermark, and to protect the copyright with an invisible watermark. These two watermarks are embedded in different blocks with different methods. Simulation results show that the visible watermark is hard to remove and the invisible watermark is robust.

Digital watermarking systems are required to embed as much information as possible in a digital media without the perceptual distortion as well as to extract it correctly with high probabilities, even though the media is subjected to many kinds of operations. To this end, guided scrambling (GS) techniques, usually used for a recording channel, are applied to digital watermarking systems. A simple GS scheme can make the power of a watermark signal larger against the power of media noise under the condition of preserving the perceptual fidelity, resulting in smaller error probabilities of the retrieved watermark bits. In addition, watermarking systems based on the GS can have more robustness to some specified operations if the prior information on the operations is given to the embedder. JPEG compression is a good example of such an operation when still images are transmitted over the Internet. In order for watermark signals to be more tolerable to the known JPEG attack, the GS-based watermark embedder is informed of advance knowledge of the JPEG compression. Further, a configuration of the GS concatenated with turbo coding is introduced to lower the bit error rate more.

A new method for blind watermarking based on quantization is proposed. The proposed scheme embeds a watermark on the lowest wavelet subband in order to be robust. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the algorithm against compression and other image processing attacks.

Fingerprinting is one of the digital watermarking techniques, and is becoming more important as a copyright protection technique. Fingerprinting must resist collusion attacks. As a security index, "c-secureness" has been proposed, but it has been known that there is indeed no c-secure code. In this paper, we introduce a new index to measure the resilience of fingerprinting for collusion attacks and obtain some upper bounds and a lower bound on the index.

A method of error concealment for JPEG2000 images is proposed in this paper. The proposed method uses the layer structure that is a feature of the JPEG2000. The most significant layer is hidden in the lowest layer of the JPEG2000 bit stream, and this embedded layer is used for error concealment. The most significant layer is duplicated because JPEG2000 uses bit-plane coding. In this coding, when the upper layers are affected by errors, the coefficients of the lower layers become meaningless. A bit stream encoded using the proposed method has the same data structure as a standard JPEG2000. Therefore, it can be decoded by a standard decoder. Our simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A digital watermarking method for moving pictures is proposed in which a watermark can be retrieved from an MPEG bitstream directly. In the proposed method, the watermark is embedded in multiple frames of an original moving picture, and it is detected statistically using multiple frames. Embedding is based on the modification of DCT coefficients that are in the chosen pixel blocks in each video frame. These pixel blocks are chosen differently per video frame in order to avoid regularity and periodicity. The features of the proposed method are that it does not need the original picture nor MPEG decoding processing. The proposed method is evaluated through various attacks including MPEG encoding and StirMark tools. It is shown that the watermark can survive MPEG encoding and frequency domain attacks. The reliability of watermark retrieval is also discussed in terms of statistical test.

This paper suggests that a watermarking technique based on the number theoretic transform (NTT) may effectively be employed for detecting alterations on lossless digital master images. Due to its fragility, the NTT-based technique is sensitive to detecting alterations, compared with that based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT).

New methods for digital image watermarking based on the characteristics of vector quantization (VQ) are proposed. In contrast with conventional watermark embedding algorithms to embed only one watermark at a time into the original source, we present one algorithm to embed multiple watermarks for copyright protection. The embedding and extraction processes are efficient for implementing with conventional VQ techniques, and they can be accomplished in parallel to shorten the processing time. After embedding, embedder would output one watermarked reconstruction image and several secret keys associated with the embedded watermarks. These secret keys are then registered to the third party to preserve the ownership of the original source in order to prevent the attackers from inserting counterfeit watermarks. Simulation results show that under no attacks, the embedded watermarks could be perfectly extracted. If there are some intentional attacks in our simulation, all the watermarks could survive to protect the copyrights. Therefore, we are able to claim the robustness, usefulness, and ease of implementation of our algorithm.

The technique of the digital watermarking is one of the ways to resolve copyright ownership and verify originality of digital contents (e.g. text documents, audio, still images, video, etc.). In this paper, we obtained global robustness and minimal error through using frame based watermarking and including DC and AC coefficients of DCT transform, which extended conventional watermarking method having local robustness and error through using block based and/or AC coefficients only. As a result, the high robustness and quality of our method were proved by several attacks such as lossy image compression, linear filtering, additive noise, scaling, cropping and so on. Watermarks embedded by our method are survived most of JPEG compressions.

This paper describes a new approach to the digital watermarking of motion pictures dedicatedly for the MPEG-4 video coding, which intends to enhance the error detection ability. The conventional method lacks not only the detection ability but also the compatibility with video decoders widely used today. Thus in this approach the digital watermarks are to be embedded into the quantized DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) coefficients for the error detection, where the prevention of the picture quality degradation is also attempted. Experimental results are shown to demonstrate that the error detection ability of the proposed approach is significantly improved, as compared with that of the conventional method, and that the degradation of the picture quality by the watermarking is extremely small.