Sharif Digital Repository

Rapidly improving video-editing software tools and algorithms have made video content manipulation and modification feasible even by inexpert users. Detecting video tampering and recovering the original content of the tampered videos is, thus, a major need in many applications. Although detection and localization of the tampering in certain types of video editing have successfully been addressed in the literature, attempts for recovering the tampered videos are bound to methods using watermarks. In this paper, a scheme for the reconstruction of the tampered video through watermarking is proposed. The watermark payload, which consists of highly compressed versions of keyframes of the video... 

This paper proposes a semi-fragile, robust-to-JPEG2000 compression watermarking method which is based on the Human Visual System (HVS). This method is designed to verify the content integrity of Region of Interest (ROI) in tele-radiology images. The design of watermarking systems based on HVS leads to the possibility of embedding watermarks in places that are not obvious to the human eye. In this way, notwithstanding increased capacity and robustness, it becomes possible to hide more watermarks. Based on perceptual model of HVS, we propose a new watermarking scheme that embeds the watermarks using a replacement method. Thus, the proposed method not only detects the watermarks but also... 

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... 

We extend the Watson image quality metric to 3D images through the concept of integral imaging. In the Watson's model, perceptual thresholds for changes to the DCT coefficients of a 2D image are given for information hiding. These thresholds are estimated in a way that the resulting distortion in the 2D image remains undetectable by the human eyes. In this paper, the same perceptual thresholds are estimated for a 3D scene in the integral imaging method. These thresholds are obtained based on the Watson's model using the relation between 2D elemental images and resulting 3D image. The proposed model is evaluated through subjective tests in a typical image steganography scheme  

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... 

In this paper, a discrete cosine transform (DCT) based blind watermarking scheme based on spread spectrum communications is proposed. We perform block-based DCT (BDCT) on the host image; then using the DC coefficients of each block, we construct a low-resolution approximation image. We apply BDCT on this approximation image, then watermark is embedded by adding a pseudo random noise sequence into its high frequencies. In detection stage, 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, higher robustness is obtained... 

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 DCT-based blind watermarking scheme based on spread spectrum communications is proposed. We perform block-based DCT on 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 watermark is embedded by adding a pseudo random noise sequence into its high frequencies. In detection stage, 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, higher robustness is obtained because of embedding... 

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... 

One of the most important parameters in evaluating a watermarking algorithm is its capacity. Of course capacity has a paradoxical relation with two other important parameters: image quality and robustness. Generally, watermarking capacity is expressed by bit per pixel (bpp) unit measure. This measure does not show what the side effects would be on image quality and capacity. Therefore, we proposed a two dimensional measure named capacity curve which shows the effects of capacity on visual quality. In this measure we can find the amount of degradation by a numerical value for each modification in pixels. Our experimental results are compatible with previous works in this field. © 2008... 

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 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... 

In this paper, a new multiplicative semi-blind image-adaptive watermarking system has been presented, which exploits human visual model for adapting the watermark data to local properties of the host image. To have a better robustness, the proposed algorithm is implemented on the low-frequency coefficients of the wavelet transform. Moreover, regarding invisibility of the algorithm, the strength factor which controls the watermark power is optimally selected. To extract the watermark data, the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimator is used. Experimental results confirm the imperceptibility of the proposed method and its high robustness against various attacks such as JPEG compression, noise... 

One of the main properties of fragile watermarking schemes is to indicate the location of changes made to the image, i.e. tamper localization, In addition to detection of watermarked image modifications. In this paper, the localization property Is added to the SVD(Singular Value Decomposition) based fragile watermarking scheme proposed by Byun et al. To do this, a hierarchical watermarking structure is used, where the Image is partitioned into blocks In a multilevel hierarchy, and then the SVD-based algorithm Is employed at each level to Insert authenticating data In sub-blocks. In the verification process, blocks at the lowest hierarchical level can detect modifications made to the... 

The ubiquity of broadband digital communications and mass storage in modern society has stimulated the widespread acceptance of digital media. However, easy access to royalty-free digital media has also resulted in a reduced perception in society of the intellectual value of digital media and has promoted unauthorised duplication practices. To detect and discourage the unauthorised duplication of media, researchers have investigated watermarking methods to embed ownership data into media. However, some authorities have expressed doubt over the efficacy of watermarking methods to protect digital media. The paper introduces a novel method to discourage unauthorised duplication of digital... 

Watermarking (imperceptible insertion of data into the host image or soundtracks) has attracted many research interests in the recent decade. The aim of this correspondence is to introduce a none-blind, content-based method for image watermarking. It employs properties of Human Visual System (HVS) and is capable of embedding a high-energy watermark (consequently robust against lossy compressions and other kinds of attacks) while prevents perceptible degradation in the host image. To modulate the binary coded watermark on a spread-spectrum noise, the introduced algorithm is followed by spread-spectrum watermarking. The algorithm was simulated and experimental results represent magnificent...