The History Of The Digital Watermarking Techniques

The History Of The digital Watermarking TechniquesAbstractdigital waterlineing proficiencys have been actual to protect the procure of media signals. This field aims to contri moreovere a universal revaluation and primer about the watermarking definition, thought and the primary(prenominal) contributions in this field. The study leave behind start with a cosmopolitan view of digital information, the Internet and the products of these two, namely, the multimedia and the e-commerce. The study pull up stakes confronts an lengthy and deep literature refresh of the field of digital watermarking and watermarking algorithmic rules.Introductiondigital watermarking techniques have been developed to protect the right of first publication of media signals. Different watermarking schemes have been suggested for multimedia content ( personas, video and audio signal). This study aims to provide an extensive literature review of the multimedia copyright tax shelter. It prese nts a universal review and soil about the watermarking definition, concept and the main contributions in this field.Digital Intellectual spaceInformation is becoming widely on tap(predicate) via global networks. These connected networks fall by the moodside cross-references between informationbases. The advent of multimedia is allowing different applications to mix sound, grasps, and video and to move with enlarged amounts of information (e.g., in e-business, distance education, and gay-machine interface). The industry is investing to supply audio, image and video information in electronic form to customers, and open television system companies, major corporations and photo archives atomic number 18 converting their content from parallel of latitude to digital form. This movement from traditional content, much(prenominal) as paper catalogues, analog recordings, to digital media is due to several avails of digital media over the traditional media. close to of th ese advantages arThe quality of digital signals is prouder than that of their corresponding analogue signals. traditionalistic assets degrade in quality as time passes. Analogue information require expensive systems to obtain high quality copies, whereas digital data lav be easily copied without outlet of fidelity.Digital data (audio, image and video signals) dejection be easily genic over networks, for ensample the Internet. A large amount of multimedia data is now available to users all over the world. This expansion will continue at an even off heavy(p)er rate with the widening availability of advanced multimedia operate the like electronic commerce, advertising, interactive TV, digital libraries, and a spread more. take copies of digital data can be easily make. This is very recyclable but it also creates problems for the possessor of valuable digital data like precious digital images. Replicas of a presumption percentage of digital data can non be place and their origin cannot be confirmed. It is im accomplishable to determine which piece is the pilot light and which is the copy.It is possible to mist some information within digital data in such a way that data modifications argon undetectable for the human senses.Copyright Protection of Intellectual PropertyAn strategic factor that slows down the growth of multimedia-networked services is that authors, publishers and providers of multimedia data are reluctant to allow the distribution of their documents in a networked environment. This is because the ease of reproducing digital data in their exact original form is likely to get along copyright violation, data misappropriation and abuse. These are the problems of theft and distribution of mental property. Therefore, creators and distributors of digital data are actively seeking reliable solutions to the problems associated with copyright protection of multimedia data.Moreover, the future development of networked multimedia syste ms, in finicky on open networks like the Internet, is conditi unmatchedd by the development of in force(p) manners to protect data owners against unofficial copying and redistribution of the material put on the network. This will guarantee that their rights are saved and their assets properly managed. Copyright protection of multimedia data has been accomplished by means of cryptography algorithms to provide control over data gravel and to make data undecipherable to non-authorized users. However, encoding systems do not completely solve the problem, because once encryption is removed there is no more control on the scattering of data. The concept of digital watermarking arose plot trying to solve problems related to the copyright of intellectual property in digital media. It is utilise as a means to identify the owner or distributor of digital data. Watermarking is the exhi chomp of encoding hidden copyright information since it is possible today to hold in information messages within digital audio, video, images and texts, by taking into account the limitations of the human audio and visual systems.Digital Watermarking What, Why, When and How?It seems that digital watermarking is a good way to protect intellectual property from dirty copying. It provides a means of introduceding a message in a piece of digital data without destroying its value. Digital watermarking embeds a known message in a piece of digital data as a means of identifying the rightful owner of the data. These techniques can be used on many types of digital data including hitherto imagery, movies, and music.What is Digital Watermarking?A digital watermark is a signal permanently embedded into digital data (audio, images, video, and text) that can be detected or extracted later by means of computing operations in set to make assertions about the data. The watermark is hidden in the multitude data in such a way that it is inseparable from the data and so that it is resistant t o many operations not degrading the armament document. so by means of watermarking, the work is still accessible but permanently marked.Digital watermarking techniques derive from steganography, which means covered writing (from the Greek actors line stegano or covered and graphos or to write). Steganography is the science of communicating information while secrecy the existence of the communication. The final stage of steganography is to fog an information message infixed harmless messages in such a way that it is not possible even to detect that there is a secret message present. both(prenominal) steganography and watermarking belong to a category of information hiding, but the purposeives and conditions for the two techniques are just the opposite. In watermarking, for example, the principal(prenominal) information is the external data (e.g., images, voices, etc.). The internal data (e.g., watermark) are additional data for protect the external data and to prove posses sion. In steganography, however, the external data (referred to as a vessel, container, or dummy data) are not very important. They are just a carrier of the important information. The internal data are the most important. On the other hand, watermarking is not like encryption. Watermarking does not restrict access to the data while encryption has the aim of making messages unintelligible to any unauthorized persons who readiness intercept them. Once encrypted data is decrypted, the media is no longer protected. A watermark is designed to permanently reside in the host data. If the ownership of a digital work is in question, the information can be extracted to completely characterize the owner.Digital watermarking is an enabling engineering science for e-commerce strategies conditional and user-specific access to services and resources. Digital watermarking offers several advantages. The details of a good digital watermarking algorithm can be made public knowledge. Digital waterma rking provides the owner of a piece of digital data the means to mark the data invisibly. The mark could be used to serialize a piece of data as it is sold or used as a method to mark a valuable image. For example, this marking allows an owner to safely short letter an image for viewing but legally provides an embedded copyright to repeal others from posting the same image. Watermarks and attacks on watermarks are two sides of the same coin. The goal of both is to preserve the value of the digital data. However, the goal of a watermark is to be robust enough to resist attack but not at the expense of altering the value of the data being protected. On the other hand, the goal of the attack is to remove the watermark without destroying the value of the protected data. The contents of the image can be marked without visible loss of value or dependence on specific formats. For example a bitmap (BMP) image can be compressed to a JPEG image. The top is an image that requires less stora ge space but cannot be distinguished from the original. Generally, a JPEG conglutination level of 70% can be use without humanly visible degradation. This property of digital images allows insertion of additional data in the image without altering the value of the image. The message is hidden in unused visual space in the image and stays below the human visible threshold for the image.When Did the Technique Originate?The idea of hiding data in another media is very old, as set forth in the case of steganography. Nevertheless, the term digital watermarking first appeared in 1993, when Tirkel et al. (1993) presented two techniques to hide data in images. These methods were based on modifications to the least significant bit (LSB) of the pixel values.How Can We Build an Effective Watermarking Algorithm?It is desired that watermarks win image-processing manipulations such as rotation, scaling, image compression and image enhancement, for example. Taking advantage of the discrete wav elet transmute properties and robust features extraction techniques are the innovative trends that are used in the recent digital image watermarking methods. boldness against geometrical convertation is essential since image-publishing applications often apply some benignant of geometrical renderations to the image, and thus, an intellectual property ownership protection system should not be affected by these changes.Visible vs. Invisible WatermarksDigital watermarking is dissever into two main categories visible and concealed. The idea behind the visible watermark is very simple. It is equivalent to stamping a watermark on paper, and for this reason its sometimes said to be digitally stamped. An example of visible watermarking is provided by television channels, like BBC, whose logo is visibly superimposed on the corner of the TV run into. Invisible watermarking, on the other hand, is a far more labyrinthian concept. It is most often used to identify copyright data, lik e author, distributor, and so forth.Though a lot of question has been done in the line of business of invisible watermarks, much less has been done for visible watermarks. Visible and invisible watermarks both serve to deter theft but they do so in very different ways. Visible watermarks are especially effective for conveying an immediate claim of ownership (Mintzer, Braudaway Yeung, 1997). Their main advantage, in commandment at least, is the virtual elimination of the commercial value of a document to a would-be thief, without lessening the documents utility for legitimate, authorized purposes. Invisible watermarks, on the other hand, are more of an aid in catching a thief than for discouraging theft in the first place (Mintzer et al., 1997 Swanson et al., 1998).Watermarking sortThere are different classifications of invisible watermarking algorithms. The reason behind this is the massive diversity of watermarking schemes. Watermarking approaches can be distinguished in ter ms of watermarking host signal (still images, video signal, audio signal, integrated circuit design), and the availability of original signal during extraction (non-blind, semi-blind, blind). Also, they can be categorized based on the landing field used for watermarking embedding process, as shown in Figure 1. The watermarking application is considered one of the criteria for watermarking classification. Figure 2 shows the subcategories based on watermarking applications.Figure 1 salmagundi of watermarking algorithms based on existence used for the watermarking embedding processFigure 2 Classification of watermarking engineering science based on applicationsDigital Watermarking AlgorithmsCurrent watermarking techniques described in the literature can be assort into three main classes. The first includes the convert stadium methods, which embed the data by modulating the transform region signal coefficients. The second class includes the spatial theatre of operations techni ques. These embed the watermark by directly modifying the pixel values of the original image. The transform domain techniques have been found to have the greater rigor, when the watermarked signals are well-tried after having been subjected to common signal distortions. The third class is the feature domain technique. This technique takes into account region, boundary and object characteristics. Such watermarking methods may present additional advantages in terms of staining and recovery from geometric attacks, compared to antecedent approaches.The algorithms in this study are organized according to their embedding domain, as indicated in Figure 1. These are grouped intospatial domain techniquesTransform domain techniquesFeature domain techniquesHowever, due to the amount of published work in the field of watermarking technology, the main focus will be on wavelet-based watermarking technique papers. The wavelet domain is the most efficient domain for watermarking embedding so fa r. However, the review considers some other techniques, which serve the purpose of giving a broader picture of the existing watermarking algorithms. rough examples of spatial domain and fractal-based techniques will be reviewed.Spatial landed estate TechniquesThis section gives a brief introduction to the spatial domain technique to gives some background information about watermarking in this domain. many a(prenominal) spatial techniques are based on adding fixed amplitude actor noise (PN) sequences to an image. PN sequences are used as the spreading key when considering the host media as the noise in a spread spectrum system, where the watermark is the transmitted message. In this case, the PN sequence is used to spread the data bits over the spectrum to hide the data.Transform Domain TechniquesMany transform-based watermarking techniques have been proposed. To embed a watermark, a transformation is first applied to the host data, and then modifications are made to the transfor m coefficients. In this section, the state of the art of the current watermarking algorithms using the transform domain is presented. The section has three main parts, including sermons of waveletbased watermarking, DCT-based watermarking and fractal domain watermarking.Digital Watermarking utilize Wavelet DecompositionThis algorithm can easily be make into video watermarking applications based on a 3-D wavelet transform due to its simple structure. The hierarchical nature of the wavelet representation allows multi-resolutional detection of the digital watermark, which is a Gaussian distributed random vector added to all the high pass bands in the wavelet domain.Discrete Cosine Transform-Based Digital Watermarking some(prenominal) watermarking algorithms have been proposed to utilize the DCT. However, the follow et al. (1995, 1997) and the Koch and Zhao (1995) algorithms are the most well-known DCT-based algorithms. Cox et al. (1995) proposed the most well-known spread spectrum w atermarking schemes. Figure 3 shows the block plot of the Cox algorithm. The image is first subjected to a global DCT. Then, the 1,000 largest coefficients in the DCT domain are selected for watermarking. They used a Gaussian sequence of pseudo-random real total of length 1,000 as a watermark. This approach achieves good robustness against compression and other common signal processing attacks. This is a result of the selection of perceptually significant transform domain coefficients. However, the algorithm is in a weak position against the invariability attack proposed by Craver (1997). Also, the global DCT utilise on the image is computationally expensive.Fractal Transform-Based Digital WatermarkingThough a lot of work has been done in the area of invisible watermarks using the DCT and the wavelet-based methods, relatively few references exist for invisible watermarks based on the fractal transform. The reason for this might be the computational expense of the fractal transfo rm. In fractal analysis, similar patterns are place in an image and only a limited amount of double star code can be embedded using this method. Since fractal analysis is computationally expensive and some images do not have many large self-similar patterns, the techniques may not be suitable for oecumenic use.Feature Domain Techniques (Second Generation Watermarking)First generation watermarking (1GW) methods have been mainly focused on applying the watermarking on the entire image/video domain. However, this approach is not compatible with novel approaches for still image and video compression. JPEG2000 and MPEG4/7 precedents are the rude(a) techniques for image and video compression. They are region or object-based, as can be seen in the compression process. Also, the 1GW algorithms proposed so far do not satisfy the watermarking requirements.Second generation watermarking (2GW) was developed in order to add the robustness and invisibility and to overcome the weaknesses of 1 GW. The 2GW methods take into account region, boundary and object characteristics and give additional advantages in terms of detection and recovery from geometric attacks compared to first generation methods. Exploiting salient region or object features and characteristics of the image achieve this. Also, 2GW methods may be designed so that selective robustness to different classes of attacks is obtained. As a result, watermark flexibility will be improved considerably.Digital Watermarking and Image Processing AttacksDigital watermarking was claimed to be the supreme solution for copyright protection over the Internet when the concept of digital watermarking was first presented. However, some problems related to robustness and shelter of watermarking algorithms to intentional or unintentional attacks still remain unsolved. These problems must be solved in advance digital watermarking can be claimed to be the ultimate solution for copyright ownership protection in digital media. O ne of these problems is the effect of geometrical transformations such as rotation, translation and scaling on the recovery of the watermark. another(prenominal) is the aegis of the watermarking algorithm when intentional attackers make use of knowledge of the watermarking algorithm to destroy or remove the watermark.Watermarking Standardization IssueThe most important question about watermarking technology is whether watermarking will be standardized and used in the near future. There are several movements to standardize watermarking technology, but no one standard has prevailed at this moment in time. Some researchers have been working to develop a standardized manakin for protecting digital images and other multimedia content through technology create into media files and corresponding application software. However, they have lacked a clear vision of what the framework should be or how it would be used.In addition, there was a discussion about how and whether watermarking shou ld form part of the standard during the standardization process of JPEG2000. The requirements regarding security have been identified in the framework of JPEG2000. However, there has been neither in-depth clearing nor a harmonized effort to address watermarking issues. It is important to deduce what rattling needs to be standardized for including the watermarking concept in JPEG2000 and to what extent. The initial drafts of the JPEG2000 standard did not mention the issue of watermarking. However, there is a plan to escort how watermarking might be best applied within JPEG2000. The features of a given watermarking scheme are likely to offer designers an opportunity to integrate watermarking technology into JPEG2000 for different application such as distributing images on the Internet. Also, standardization of digital watermarking will influence the progress in imaging standards of JPEG2000 where the data security will be part of this standard. Therefore, the likelihood is that wat ermarking technology will be used in conjunction with JPEG2000 (Clark, 2000).Future HighlightsNevertheless, the future seems bright for digital watermarking. Many companies have already been active in digital watermarking research. For example, Microsoft has developed a prototype system that limits unauthorized playback of music by embedding a watermark that remains permanently attached to audio files. Such technology could be included as a default playback mechanism in future versions of the Windows operating system. If the music industry begins to include watermarks in its striving files, Windows would refuse to play copyrighted music released after a real date that was obtained illegally. Also, Microsoft Research has also invented a separate watermarking system that relies on graph theory to hide watermarks in software. Normally the security technology is hack able. However, if the technology is combined with proper legal enforcement, industry standards and prize of the privac y of individuals seeking to legitimately use intellectual property, digital watermarking will encourage content creators to trust the Internet more. There is a nasty amount of money at stake for many firms. The value of illegal copies of multimedia content distributed over the Internet could reach billions of dollars a year. It will be interesting to see how the development and adoption of digital watermarking plays out. With such high stakes involved for entertainment and other multimedia companies, they are likely to keep pushing for (and be willing to pay for) a secure technology that they can use to track and reduce copyright violation and capture some of their foregone revenues. Finally, it is expected that a great deal of effort must still be put into research before digital image watermarking can be widely authorized as legal evidence of ownership.ConclusionThis study was started with a general view of digital data, the Internet and the products of these two, namely, multim edia and e-commerce. It provided some initial background and history of digital watermarking. This study gave an extensive and deep literature review of the field of digital watermarking. The concept of digital watermarking and the requirements of digital watermarking were discussed and digital watermarking algorithms were reviewed. They were grouped into three main collections based on the embedding domain, that is, spatial domain techniques, transform domain techniques or feature domain techniques. The algorithm of the frequency domain were further subdivided into wavelet, DCT and fractal transform techniques. Finally, the future perspective of digital watermarking was highlighted.