Information Hiding Techniques Information Hiding: Digital Watermarking and Steganography

Xiaojun Qi

Watermarking
The use of watermarks is almost as old as paper manufacturing. In general, watermarking is a technique of impressing into the paper a form of image, or text derived from the negative in the mold, as the paper fibers are squeezed and dried.

Watermarking (Cont.)
In more recent times, watermarks have been used to certify the composition of paper, including the nature of the fibers used. Today most developed countries also watermark their paper, currencies, and postage stamps to make forgery more difficult. The digitization of our world has expanded the concept of watermarking to include immaterial digital impressions for use in authenticating ownership claims and protecting proprietary 4 interests.

Definition of Watermarking
It is the process that embeds data called a watermark, tag, or label into a multimedia object such that watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the object. The object may be an image or audio or video or text.

Information Hiding Related Terminologies

Embedded Message: Something to be hidden in something else. Stego image: The output of hiding process. Cover image: The original form of the stego image. Stegokey: Additional secret data that may be needed in the hiding process. The standard case where the same key is used in embedding and extracting is called symmetric.
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Information Hiding Related Terminologies (Cont.)

Embedding: The process of hiding the embedded message Extracting: Get the embedded message out of the stego-object. Stegoanalyst: The party from whom the embedded message is hidden. Embeddor/Extractor: An entity of person that embeds and extracts is called an embeddor or an extractor, respectively.
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Types of Digital Watermarks

Based on the type of document to be watermarked:
Image Watermarking Video Watermarking Audio Watermarking Text Watermarking

Types of Digital Watermarks (Cont.)

Based on the human perception:
Visible Watermark Invisible-Robust Watermark Invisible-Fragile Watermark Dual Watermarking

Invisible-Robust Watermark and Its Applications

Invisible-robust watermark is embedded in such a way that alterations made to the pixel value is perceptually not noticed and it can be recovered only with appropriate decoding mechanism. Applications:
Detect misappropriated images Show the evidence of ownership
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Desired Characteristics of Invisible Robust Watermarks

It should neither be noticeable to the viewer nor should degrade the quality of the content. It must be robust to common signal distortions and must be resistant to various intentional tamperings solely intended to remove the watermark. Retrieval of watermark should unambiguously identify the owner. It is desirable to design a watermark whose decoder is scalable with each generation of computer. The amount of pixel modification should be minimum. Insertion of watermark should require little human intervention or labor.
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Invisible-Fragile Watermark and Its Applications

The invisible-fragile watermark is embedded in such a way that any manipulation or modification of the image would alter or destroy the watermark. Applications:
Used for a trustworthy camera so the news agency can verify that an image is true to the original capture and has not been edited to falsify a scene. Detect alteration of images stored in a digital 14 library.

Desired Characteristics of Invisible Fragile Watermarks

Neither be noticeable to the viewer nor should degrade the quality of the content. Be readily modified when the image pixel values have been altered. Secure. This means that it is impossible to recover the changes, or regenerate the watermark after image alterations, even when the watermarking procedure and/or the watermark itself is known. The amount of individual pixel modification should be as small as possible.
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Dual Watermark and Its Applications

Dual watermark is a combination of a visible and an invisible watermark. In this type of watermark, an invisible watermark is used as a backup for the visible watermark.

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Robust vs. Fragile Watermarking

Robust watermarking: Alice wants to send an information message coupled with a host message, in such a way that Bob (or anyone else) is not able to retransmit a message similar to the host without also retransmitting the information. (The information is not necessarily secret.) Fragile watermarking: Alice wants to send an information message coupled with a host message, in such a way that Bob (or anyone else) is not able to retransmit a modified message similar to the host while retaining the information.
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Three Components of Digital Watermarking

In general, any watermarking scheme (algorithm) consists of three parts:
The watermark The encoder (embedding algorithm) The decoder and comparator
Watermark extraction: Extract watermark in its exact form. It can be used to prove ownership. Watermark detection: Detect whether a specific given watermarking signal is present in an image. It can be used to verify ownership.
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Attacks on Watermarks: Typical Distortions and Intentional Tampering

Lossy Compression: JPEG and MPEG Geometric Distortion: Rotation, Translation, Scaling, and Cropping Common Image Processing Operations: D/A or A/D Conversion, Resampling, Requantization, Dithering, Recompression, Linear Filtering, Non-Linear Filtering, Color Reduction, Addition of Offset Value, Addition of Noise, Local Exchange of Pixels. Other Intentional Tamperings: Printing and Rescanning, Rewatermarking, Collusion, Forgery, IBM Attack, Unzign Attack, Stirmark 20 Attack.

Embedding Algorithm
/DWT

Extraction/Detection Algorithm
/DWT

DWT

/DWT

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Watermarking Project Emphasis: Blind Watermarking

Blind watermarking: The cover image (the original image) is not needed during the detection process to detect the watermark. Solely the key, which is typically used to generate some random sequence used during the embedding process, is required.
These types of schemes can be used easily in mass market electronic equipment or software.
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Watermarking Project Emphasis: Invisible-Robust Watermarking

An invisible-robust watermark should be stuck to the document it has been embedded in, in such a way that any signal transform of reasonable strength cannot remove the watermark. Hence a pirate willing to remove the watermark will not succeed.
This task is very challenging and attracts most research.
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Watermarking Project Emphasis: Frequency Domain

Discrete Cosine Transform Discrete Fourier Transform Discrete Wavelet Transform Others

Watermarking Project Emphasis: Perceptual Mask (Optional)

Perceptual mask indicates the maximum change one can make to a pixel (in case of images/video), before the change becomes noticeable. Some authors call the functions which generate the scale of visibility due to watermark as Just Noticeable Difference (JND) or Noise Visibility Functions (NVF). Some models like Watson metric, non-stationary Gaussian model and PSNR quality metric can be found in checkmark benchmarking tool.
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Accomplishments in Previous REU

Published 3 premier conference papers
Int. Conf. on Image Processing, Sept., San Antonio, TX, 2007. Int. Conf. on Image Processing, Oct., Atlanta, GA, 2006. IASTED International Conference on Signal and Image Processing, August, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2006.

Hope to get at least 1 conference paper from this REU program

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