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With the widespread internet usage, digital contents are easily distributed throughout the world. To eliminate concerns of producers and owners of digital contents, watermarking techniques are extensively being used. Robustness against intentional and unintentional attacks is a major quality of watermarking systems. Since different attacks tend to target different parts of the frequency spectrum, in this paper we propose a framework for blind watermarking which determines the type of attack that the image has gone through before extracting the watermark. Within this framework, we propose an attack classification method to identify the region of the frequency spectrum that is less damaged.... 

Everyday, people share their digital media on the virtual networks; therefore, protecting them against piracy is worthy of consideration. Digital watermarking is a method to achieve this goal. In this paper, we propose a watermarking method in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. For this purpose, DCT coefficients of the whole image are calculated. It helps to present a system without blockiness effects. Then, singular values of the watermark image are added to the low frequency DCT coefficients of cover image that are located on the main diagonal. We use scaling factors for watermark embedding to improve imperceptibility of the watermark. A vector of fixed elements, which is calculated... 

This study investigates the use of structural similarity index (SSIM) on the minimised side effect to image watermarking. For the fast implementation and more compatibility with the standard discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based codecs, watermark insertion is carried out on the DCT coefficients and hence an SSIM model for DCT-based watermarking is developed. For faster implementation, the SSIM index is maximised over independent 4 × 4 non-overlapped blocks, but the disparity between the adjacent blocks reduces the overall image quality. This problem is resolved through optimisation of overlapped blocks, but, the higher image quality is achieved at a cost of high computational complexity. To... 

By expansion of digital multimedia and networking technology, the problem of ownership protection has become increasingly important. Digital watermarking is an efficient way for copyright protection of digital images. Traditional watermarking techniques degrade the quality of host image by embedding a watermark logo. Facing this problem, a new watermarking approach called zero-watermarking has been proposed. In zero-watermarking methods, the watermark does not require to be embedded into the protected image but it uses both the watermark and the protected image to generate a verification map which is registered to a trusted authority for further protection. In this paper we propose a robust... 

This paper presents an efficient scheme for blind watermark attacking using the concept of matching of the long-range data. The main idea of the proposed attack is to add plenty of noise to the watermarked image and then try to restore an unwatermarked copy of the noisy image. The aim is to destroy the watermark information without accessing the parameters used during the watermark embedding process. So, it allows our approach to be completely free from any pre-assumption on the watermarking algorithm or any other parameters that is used during the watermark embedding procedure. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm's superiority over several other traditional watermarking... 

In this paper, we used image inpainting as a means for reconstruction of small damaged portions of a watermarked image so that the hidden watermark is not detectable afterwards. Our new watermarking attack algorithm extends the exemplar-based inpainting method, and then we apply it to intended noisy watermarked images to alter the watermark detection process. Our approach is completely free from any pre-assumption on the watermarking algorithm or any other parameters that is used during the watermark embedding procedure. The average PSNR/SSIM of the watermarked image after applying the proposed attack is more than 35/0.98 and the average NC for extracted watermark is lowers than 0.5, so... 

This paper proposes an image watermarking scheme for copyright protection based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA). In the suggested scheme, embedding is carried out in cumulative form in spatial domain and ICA is used for watermark extraction. For extraction there is no need to access the original image or the watermark, and extraction is carried out only with two watermarked images. Experimental results show that the new method has better quality than famous methods [1], [2], [3] in spatial or frequency domain and is robust against various attacks. Noise addition, resizing, low pass filtering, multiple marks, gray-scale reduction, rotation, JPEG compression, and cropping are some... 

Along with the improvement of image watermarking techniques, the necessity for effectively and comprehensively evaluating various algorithms becomes imperative. In this paper, we first propose a new categorization that fits for most of the existing watermarking algorithms that work in the wavelet domain. Then an adaptive watermarking attack for evaluating the robustness of watermarking schemes that are based on the proposed categorization is presented. This attack determines the flat regions, edges, and textures of the watermarked image and based on known features of each region the proposed attack tries to destroy the watermark information. This is done by separately manipulating the... 

This paper proposes an image watermarking scheme for copyright protection based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA). In the suggested scheme, we divide the original image into blocks and use the ICA to project the image into a basis with its components as statistically independent as possible. The data embedding is carried out in cumulative form in the ICA basis and also the ICA is used for watermark extraction. The extraction process could be either non-blind, through a straightforward procedure, or blind, via a tricky method we propose. Experimental results show that the new method outperforms some well-known image watermarking methods [1], [2], [3] in spatial or frequency domain and... 

We propose a new nonblind multiresolution watermarking method for still images based on the contourlet transform (CT). In our approach, the watermark is a grayscale image which is embedded into the highest frequency subband of the host image in its contourlet domain. We demonstrate that in comparison to other methods, this method enables us to embed more amounts of data into the directional subbands of the host image without degrading its perceptibility. The experimental results show robustness against several common watermarking attacks such as compression, adding noise, filtering, and geometrical transformations. Since the proposed approach can embed considerable payload, while providing... 

Capacity is one of the most important parameters in image watermarking. Different works have been done on this subject with different assumptions on image and communication channel. However, there is not a global agreement to estimate watermarking capacity. In this paper, we suggest a method to find the capacity of images based on their complexities. We propose a new method to estimate image complexity based on the concept of Region Of Interest (ROI). Our experiments on 2000 images showed that the proposed measure has the best adoption with watermarking capacity in comparison with other complexity measures. In addition, we propose a new method to calculate capacity using proposed image... 

In this paper, we proposed a categorization for most of the existing watermarking algorithms that work in wavelet domain. Then an adaptive watermarking attack for digital images that is based on the proposed categorization is presented. This attack determines the flat regions, edges and textures of the watermarked image and based on known features of each region the proposed attack tries to destroy the watermark information by manipulating the wavelet coefficients of each region separately such that the least visual distortion will be imposed on the attacked image. We have tested the proposed method to attack two recent and robust watermarking methods and the results sound impressive. The... 

In this paper, we propose a new method for damaging and destroying robust invisible watermarks using an image resizing technique which is named seam carving. By using this method we are able to resize watermarked images in a content-aware manner so that the synchronization of the embedder and extractor of watermarking system is broken and the watermark detection becomes impossible. In contrast to the available benchmarks like Stirmark, proposed attack does not severely reduce the quality of the watermarked image. Therefore it maintains the commercial value of the watermarked image. We have tested the proposed method to attack 3 recent and robust watermarking methods and the results sound... 

In this paper we present a blind low frequency watermarking scheme on gray level images, which is based on DCT transform and spread spectrum communications technique. We compute the DCT of non overlapping 8x8 blocks of the host image, then using the DC coefficients of each block we construct a low-resolution approximation image. We apply block based DCT on this approximation image, then a pseudo random noise sequence is added into its high frequencies. For detection, we extract the approximation image from the watermarked image, then the same pseudo random noise sequence is generated, and its correlation is computed with high frequencies of the watermarked approximation image. In our method,... 

In this paper, a new scaling-based image-adaptive watermarking system has been presented, which exploits human visual model for adapting the watermark data to local properties of the host image. Its improved robustness is due to embedding in the low-frequency wavelet coefficients and optimal control of its strength factor from HVS point of view. Maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder is used aided by the channel side information. The performance of the proposed scheme is analytically calculated and verified by simulation. Experimental results confirm the imperceptibility of the proposed method and its higher robustness against attacks compared to alternative watermarking methods in the literature.... 

One of the main properties of digital watermarking methods is their security against attacks. In this paper, a novel attack against an adaptive semi-fragile image watermarking is proposed. In this attack, watermarking key and watermark are estimated by using several watermarked images. In order to improve the watermarking scheme against the proposed attack, the entropy of image blocks is utilized. Using entropy is compatible with Human Visual System (HVS); therefore it is suitable to determine the weight of watermark in image blocks. Since entropy is a sensitive feature, it is used to improve the watermarking method performance against the proposed attack. It is shown that this modification... 

In this paper, a new multiplicative image watermarking system is presented. As human visual system is less sensitive to the image edges, watermarking is applied in the contourlet domain, which represents image edges sparsely. In the presented scheme, watermark data is embedded in the most energetic directional subband. By modeling General Gaussian Distribution (GGD) for the contourlet coefficients, the distribution of watermarked noisy coefficients is analytically calculated. At the receiver, based on the Maximum Likelihood (ML) decision rule, the optimal detector is proposed. Experimental results show the imperceptibility and high robustness of the proposed method against Additive White... 

One of the main properties of semi-fragile image watermarking methods is robustness against lossy compressions, e.g. JPEG conversion. In this paper, robustness of a semi-fragile watermarking scheme based on DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform), coupled with SVD (Singular Value Decomposition), is improved. To achieve this goal a traditional, critically sampled wavelet transform is replaced by a redundant wavelet transform. The proposed approach is compared to the DWT-SVD based watermarking, introduced earlier, and significantly greater robustness under the JPEG compression is presented. ©2008 IEEE  

One of the most important parameters in evaluating a watermarking algorithm is its capacity. In fact, capacity has a paradoxical relation with other two important parameters: image quality and robustness. Some works have been done on watermarking capacity and a few on image complexities. Most works on watermarking capacity is based on information theory and the capacity values which are calculated based on these methods are very tolerate. In this paper we propose a new method for calculating image complexity based on Region Of Interest (ROI) concept. After that we analyze three complexity measures named: Image compositional complexity (ICC), Quad tree and ROI method, with three different... 

Some of the most important classes of watermark detection methods in image watermarking are correlation-based algorithms. In these methods usually a pseudorandom noise pattern is embedded in the host image. The receiver can regenerate this pattern by having a key that is the seed of a random number generator. After that if the correlation between this pattern and the image that is assumed to have the watermark is higher than a predefined threshold, it means that the watermark exists and vice versa. Here, we show the advantage of using the Julian set patterns as a watermark, instead of the commonly used pseudorandom noise pattern. Julian set patterns can be regenerated in receiver with few...