A Survey on Image Watermarking Techniques - IJSETT

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“International Journal for Science and Emerging
ISSN No. (Online):2250-3641
Technologies with Latest Trends” 18(1): 22- 26(2014) ISSN No. (Print): 2277-8136
A Survey on Image Watermarking Techniques
Surbhi*, Ashish Malhotra** and Rajesh Kochher***
* Research Scholar, DAVIET, Jalandhar
**Asst. Prof.-ECE Dept DAVIET, ***Asst. Prof.-IT Dept DAVIET
Punjab, India.
(Received 28 September 2014 Accepted 13 October 2014)
Abstract-Together with an explosive growth in the use of internet and high speed computer networks; the use
of digitally formatted data has increased many folds i.e. the data can be easily plagiarized, modified or deleted
without proper authentication and authorization. This has led to a need for effective copyright protection
tools. Digital Watermarking promises to address these issues. This paper gives a survey of Digital Image
Watermarking which helps general readers have an overview of digital image watermarking including the
definition, system requirements and process involved. In addition, the future research directions of digital
image watermarking are discussed.
Keywords-Image Watermarking, Discrete Cosine Transform, Discrete Wavelet Transform.
I. INTRODUCTION
The unprecedented increase in piracy
and digital criminality over the past years
has stimulated interest in the field of
watermarking to enhance protection
against violations of copyrighted digital
material such as digital images. This
means that the use of digital media for
image sequences has put some serious
implications for copyright control issues.
As usual there is no such thing as a free
lunch and the price paid for access to a
potentially global audience via the internet
is the lack of control over reuse of content.
For example, if a particular of a website
contains a photograph, anyone looking at
the page can use their browser to save the
image in digital form at disk. The captured
image can be then used again in ways not
intended by the copyright owner of the
material [3, 26, 28, 34].
In order to address these issues, Digital
Watermarking has emerged as a solution.
Embedding of digital watermarks into
multimedia data helped a lot to prevent
illegal copying and modification of data.
Digital Watermarking is basically a
process of embedding information in a
carrier or host image in order to protect the
Ownership of image and the signal
embedded into the host image to be
protected is called a Watermark. A digital
watermark is information that is
imperceptibly and robustly embedded in
the host data such that it cannot be
removed. A watermark typically contains
information about the origin, status or
recipient if host data [3, 8, 29].
The basic requirements in watermarking
scheme are very intuitive and applies to all
media. The requirements are as follows
[29]:


A watermark should be secret so
that only the authorised users can
legally detect, extract and even
modify the watermark.
A watermark should stay in the
host data regardless of whatever
happens to the host data including
all signal processing operations
that may occur and including all
attacks that unauthorised parties
may attempt.
23. Surbhi*, Ashish Malhotra** and Rajesh Kochher***

A watermark should, though be
ing irremovable that is it should be
imperceptible.
In terms of embedding domain,
watermarking algorithms are divided into
two groups: Spatial Domain Watermarking
Techniques and Frequency Domain
Watermarking Techniques as shown in
figure 1. In Spatial Domain; the watermark
embedding is done on image pixels while
in frequency domain; the embedding is
done after taking image transforms.
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watermarking process. Section III reviews
various
frequency
domain
image
watermarking techniques. Section IV
summarizes and concludes this paper on
digital watermarking techniques and
finally draws a future scope of this paper.
II.
GENERAL FRAMEWORK
DIGITAL WATERMARKING
OF
A digital watermarking system usually
consists of two frameworks [13] as shown in
figure 2:
1) Embedding Framework: In this
framework, first the RGB channels of host
image will be converted into the intended
channels followed by the decomposition of
first channel into DWT sub-bands. A target
sub-band will then be used for embedding
the watermark.
2) Extraction Framework: In this framework,
the original image can be recovered back
from the watermarked image using various
filters and detectors.
Figure 1. Classification
Watermarking
of
Digital
Spatial Domain techniques developed
earlier are not resistant enough to image
compression and other image processing
operations. Although spatial domain
techniques are easier to implement but are
limited in robustness while frequency
domain techniques embed watermark with
more robustness and imperceptibility.
With the development of digital
watermarking, spatial techniques due to
their weakness in robustness are generally
abandoned
and
frequency domain
algorithms become the research focus.
This paper concentrates on digital
watermarking for images in frequency
domain.
The rest of the paper is organised as
follows. Section II gives an insight into the
Figure
2.
Watermark
Embedding/Extraction Model
III.
IMAGE
TECHNIQUES
WATERMARKING
Commonly used frequency domain image
watermarking techniques include the
DWT, the DCT and DFT. However, DWT
has been used more frequently due to its
spatio-localization and multi-resolution
characteristics.
24. Surbhi*, Ashish Malhotra** and Rajesh Kochher***
A. DISCRETE WAVELET
TRANSFORM
DWT decomposes an image into a set
of band limited components which can be
reassembled to reconstruct the original
image without error [9]. Wavelet
Transform basically describes a multiresolution decomposition process in terms
of expansion of an image onto a set of
wavelet basis functions. The transform is
based on small waves called wavelets of
varying frequency and limited duration.
These wavelets are created by translations
and dilations of a fixed function called
Mother Wavelet [1, 12].
The basic idea of DWT is to separate
frequency detail, which is what we call
multi-resolution decomposition. One time
of decomposition can divide main image to
four sub graph as the size of a quarter as
shown in figure 3.
Figure 3. DWT Decomposition of Image
Using 1-Level Pyramid
Embedding watermark in lower
frequency band LLx may degrade the
image as most of the image energy is
concentrated there. On the other hand, the
high frequency band HHx include the
edges and textures of the image and human
eye is not generally sensitive to changes in
such sub-bands. This allows the watermark
to be embedded without being perceived
by the human eye. Thus the watermark is
to be embedded into the middle frequency
sub-bands LHx and HLx where acceptable
performance of imperceptibility and
robustness could be achieved [10, 12].
B. DISCRETE
COSINE
TRANSFORM
The DCT is a separable linear
transform which converts a signal from
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spatial representation into frequency
representation and helps reducing the
amount of data needed to describe the
image without sacrificing too much image
quality [2]. The popular block based DCT
transform
segments
image
nonoverlapping blocks and applies DCT to
each block. This results in giving three
coefficient sets: low frequency sub-band,
mid frequency sub-band and high
frequency
sub-band.
DCT
based
watermarking is based on two facts. The
first fact is that much of the signal energy
lies at low frequency sub-band which
contains the most important visual parts of
the image. The second fact is that high
frequency components of image are
usually removed through compression and
noise attacks. The watermark is therefore
embedded by modifying the coefficients of
middle frequency sub-band so that the
visibility of the image will not be affected.
The disadvantage of using DCT for
embedding watermark is that they are less
robust than DWT against different attacks
[9, 12].
C. JOINT DWT-DCT
The reason of applying two transforms
is based on the fact that joint transform
could make up for the disadvantages of
each other. The application of joint DWTDCT results in higher imperceptibility and
robustness [2, 8].
IV.
CONCLUSION
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
AND
In this overview paper, we have
reviewed the most important basic
concepts in digital watermarking including
its
foundation,
requirements
and
watermark framework. After that, common
frequency
domain
watermarking
techniques are introduced with analysis of
pros and cons in terms of imperceptibility
and robustness.
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25. Surbhi*, Ashish Malhotra** and Rajesh Kochher***
Our future work will rely on the
implementation and evaluation of joint
DWT-DCT based image watermarking
over HVS based and application based
colour spaces.
[10]
[11]
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