Computers & Security (2005) 24, 460e471

www.elsevier.com/locate/cose

A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique
Hsien-Chu Wu a,*, Chin-Chen Chang b
Department of Information Management, National Taichung Institute of Technology, 129 Sec. 3, San-min Road, Taichung, Taiwan 404, ROC b Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan 621, ROC
Received 28 June 2004; accepted 10 May 2005
a

KEYWORDS
Digital watermarking technique; Intellectual property rights; Vector quantization; Codebook division; Digital watermark

Abstract In this paper, a novel VQ-based digital image watermarking scheme is proposed. During the encoding process of the VQ compression technique, the proposed scheme embeds a representative digital watermark in the protected image so that the watermark can be retrieved from the image to effectively prove which party is in legal possession of the copyright in case an ownership dispute arises. In our method, the codewords in the VQ codebook are classied into different groups according to different characteristics and then each binary watermark bit is embedded into the selected VQ encoded block. The main feature of the proposed scheme is that the watermark exists both in the VQ compressed image and in the reconstructed image after VQ decoding. Because the watermark is hidden inside the compressed image, which is much smaller in size, much transmission time and storage space can be saved when the compressed data, instead of the original form, are transmitted over the Internet. Furthermore, the reconstructed image has robustness against aggressive image processing. The embedded watermark can even survive JPEG lossy compression. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction
In the modern world of information, any kind of data is available to anyone over the Internet. Of all the data transmitted over the Internet, images are
* Corresponding author. Fax: C886 4 22453902. E-mail addresses: wuhc@ntit.edu.tw (H.-C. Wu), ccc@cs. ccu.edu.tw (C.-C. Chang).

the most common means of message conveyance. However, the convenient access to the images on the Internet makes it easy for anyone to download, copy, edit, or distribute images with ease, which of course has a direct and severe impact on the copyright owners (many times the image creators themselves). Therefore, copyright protection for intellectual property on the Internet is an important issue.

0167-4048/$ - see front matter 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cose.2005.05.001

A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique For digital images, digital watermarking techniques (Bender et al., 1996; Bors and Pitas, 1996; Chang and Hwang, in press; Chang et al., 2000; Chang and Tsai, 2000; Cox et al., 1997; Cox and Linnartz, 1998; Craver et al., 1998; Darmstaedter et al., 1998; Hsu and Wu, 1999; Kutter et al., 1998; Lu et al., 2000; Makur and Selvi, 2001; Niu et al., 2000; Swason et al., 1998; Voyatzis et al., 1999) provide effective image authentication to protect intellectual property rights. The digital watermark represents the copyright information of the protected image. In general, a digital watermark can be a logo, label, or a random sequence. With the use of the watermark embedding process in the watermarking technique, a digital watermark can be embedded into the protected image and produce a watermarked image. Afterwards, the owner can broadcast the watermarked image over the Internet. When a dispute over the copyright of the digital image occurs, the legal owner can be veried using the watermark verifying process. Digital watermarking is like embedding a digital signature into the original image. An effective image watermarking technique must possess the following characteristics (Bender et al., 1996; Bors and Pitas, 1996; Chang and Hwang, in press; Chang et al., 2000; Chang and Tsai, 2000; Cox et al., 1997; Cox and Linnartz, 1998; Craver et al., 1998; Darmstaedter et al., 1998; Hsu and Wu, 1999; Kutter et al., 1998; Lu et al., 2000; Makur and Selvi, 2001; Niu et al., 2000; Swason et al., 1998; Voyatzis et al., 1999): (1) After embedding the watermarked image, the watermarked image that is produced and the original image cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. (2) Illegal users cannot add to or remove the watermark from the watermarked image. (3) After the watermarked image goes through an image processing operation such as JPEG compression, sharpening, rotating, blurring, or cropping, the watermark extracted from the modied watermarked image is still identiable. Until now, many researchers have come up with a variety of watermarking techniques, and the techniques proposed so far have been highly effective in the area of copyright protection. However, most current watermarking techniques embed the watermark in a normal, original image instead of a compressed image. They offer considerable security for normal, uncompressed images, and yet they fail to take into consideration the inevitable fact that, due to limited frequency

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bandwidth, almost all of the images traveling over the Internet are in compressed forms in order to save transmission time and storage space. Therefore, to allow for application to the Internet, a new watermarking approach has recently been used to combine with image compression techniques to embed a digital watermark into the compressed image. It is worthwhile to note that image compression and image watermarking have some common features. In image compression, an image is encoded using its most signicant characteristics. After compression, the greatest concern is that the distortion of the decompressed image must be controlled. On the other hand, in image watermarking, the embedded watermark must not degrade the image quality of the watermarked image. With this similar goal, the image compression approach can aid in the implementation of watermark embedding and detection. Recently, Lu et al. (2000) presented a VQ-based digital image watermarking method. This method utilizes the codebook expansion technique to produce a partition of the codebook. According to the different sets in the partition of the codebook, the watermark can be embedded into an image. This method is simple and effective. The authors claim that if the codebook is kept secret, their method can provide the secure feature. Makur and Selvi (2001) proposed another watermarking scheme based on variable dimension VQ (VDVQ) for hiding a watermark into images. The main property of VDVQ is the use of a codebook that contains codewords of varying dimensions. To embed the binary watermark, this method uses a codebook that contains codewords of two different dimensions. When an image block is encoded, the dimension of the selected codeword is set according to the corresponding embedded watermark bit. However, the embedded watermark is fragile. The decoding and re-encoding of the compressed image may easily remove the embedded watermark. In this paper, we propose a new method of digital image watermarking that embeds the watermark in an image already compressed via the VQ compression technique. We would like to emphasize here that the watermark exists in both the VQ compressed image and the VQ decoded image. Furthermore, the experimental results show that our digital image watermarking method enables images to withstand a number of destructive image processing procedures including cropping, blurring, sharpening, and JPEG lossy compression. Therefore, our novel watermarking technique can effectively and efciently protect

462 the copyright of images on the Internet or in other places where VQ compression is employed.

H.-C. Wu, C.-C. Chang rights of the protected image. What is most remarkable about our method is that the watermark is embedded in the protected image that has already been compressed via VQ. As a result, our method is especially suitable for the copyright protection of the images that are transmitted over the Internet. For the protected gray-level image HI, let the binary digital watermark WI represent its copyright information. HI and WI are dened in Eqs. (1) and (2), respectively. Generally speaking, the image size of WI is less than that of HI; thus, let M ! N. HIZfxi; jj0ξ j&255; 0&i; j&N 1g: WIZfwp; qjwp; qZ0 or 1; 0&p; q&M 1g: 1 2

Vector quantization image compression technique

The VQ technique (Linde et al., 1980) is widely used as an image compression method, just as JPEG is well celebrated as a lossy compression method. VQ has fairly good performance in both compression ratio and extracted image quality. After cutting the original image into blocks, the VQ encoder is used to search each block throughout the codebook for the codeword which is most similar to the image block. The index values of the codewords closest to the blocks are recoded so as to compress the image. When decompressing the image, the VQ decoder can use these index values to recover the corresponding blocks and reconstruct the image. The VQ codebook can be either private or public. The private codebook, kept secret as its name implies, is created by the sender and therefore has to be transmitted to the receiver along with the compressed image le. On the other hand, the public codebook is open to everyone, so both the sender and the receiver have the same codebook, and there is no need for the sender to transmit it to the receiver along with the compressed image. Our watermarking technique works well for both the private codebook and the public codebook. The proposed scheme employs LBG (Linde et al., 1980) to create the codebook. As a matter of fact, a codebook trained by LBG can oftentimes contain many codewords that are similar to each other though none of them is exactly the same. In light of this property, when referencing the codebook to recover the compressed image blocks, we can use a similar codeword to take the place of the current one and obtain a similar result. Therefore, to embed the watermark, the proposed scheme organizes the codewords into divisions according to the degrees of similarity between the codewords. The codewords within the same division are similar to each other, and thus, when embedding the watermark bit into an image block, we can pick out any one codeword from a division and substitute it for the block without drastically affecting the recovered image quality.

Once HI and WI are given, our scheme employs the VQ image compression method to embed WI into HI to generate a watermarked image HI#. When the legality of ownership needs to be conrmed, the watermark extraction process in this scheme will be used to successfully detect the embedded watermark in HI#. The watermark embedding and watermark extraction processes are discussed in detail in the following subsections.

Watermark embedding process

Codebook division Since our watermarking technique depends on the divisions of the codebook to complete watermark embedding, this subsection is devoted to illustrating the division construction process. Let the initial codebook trained by LBG be CB such that each codeword CW in CB contains a ! a elements. Through the codebook division process, in each division, there will be two codewords, numbered 0 and 1, respectively, so that codeword 0 is used to embed watermark bit 0. The codeword 1 corresponds to watermark bit 1. The two codewords most similar to each other are classied into the same division with their index values recorded in the codebook. The degree of similarity between one codeword and the others is determined by calculating the mean square error (MSE). The MSE of two codewords CWx and CWy is dened by Eq. (3).
a1 a1 1 XX 2 MSE CWx ; CWy Z 2 CWx i; j CWy i; j : a iZ0 jZ0

The proposed scheme

The proposed VQ-based watermarking technique effectively safeguards the intellectual property

3 For example, suppose we want to build the divisions for a codebook containing 256 codewords.

A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique Putting two codewords in every division, we will have a total of 128 divisions. When the division process is completed, let CB Z {D1, D2, ., Dn}, where each Di, composed of the indices and codeword numbers of the two most similar codewords CWi0 and CWi1 , is a codebook division. Watermark embedding When the division construction of the codebook has been completed, we can start embedding the watermark. Fig. 1 is the block diagram of the watermark embedding process. The following steps describe the details about the proposed embedding process: Step 1: Segment the image HI into non-overlapping blocks with equal size a ! a. Let HI be composed of blocks HB1, HB2, ., HBm. Following the conventional VQ, search CB for the closest codeword to each block HBj and record the index value of this codeword. Similarly, the MSE is calculated here to determine whether or not a block is similar to a codeword; that is to say, the codeword with the smallest MSE in a block is considered to be the most similar codeword to the block. Step 2: Use K as the seed of the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) and perform PRNG(K ) to randomly pick out M ! M indices generated in Step 1. Map a watermark pixel to a chosen index in sequence. Step 3: In the classied codebook divisions, for every index value selected in the previous step, search for the corresponding division and codeword number and record them. When doing the recording, use S bits to keep track of the division number and use one bit to write down the codeword number, where S is set to be Qlog nS. That means every recorded item takes up as many as S C 1 bits. For example, to record an index in the division for a codebook with 256 codewords where every division has two codewords, we need 7 bits (i.e., Qlog 256=2SZQlog 128SZ7) to locate the division. Because every division is composed of only two codewords, we need just one bit to indicate which one of the two is the codeword. That is, in this example, S is 7. To be more specic, the index for the codeword numbered 1 in the rst division is

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00000001, where the rst part 0000000 locates the division and the last bit 1 indicates that the codeword is numbered 1. Step 4: For each recorded item, replace its corresponding number bit with the pixel value of the watermark. For example, suppose the watermark bit 1 is embedded in the recorded item 00000010, the embedding result will be 00000011 with the last bit to be replaced by the watermark bit. Step 5: Find the index values corresponding to the recorded items, and then compress the image with all of the indices. Let the generated watermarked image be HI#. Note that the size of the digital watermark that can be embedded in HI depends on the size of HI and the size of the divided block. The maximum

Original image HI HBis Block Partition

Codebook CB VQ encoding Encoded indices PRNG Seed K Selected M M indices

Watermark image WI

Mapping each watermark bit to a selected index and searching for the codebook division and codeword number for each index

Replacing the codeword number by the corresponding watermark bit

Finding codeword indices for the selected ones in the codebook divisions

Compressed, watermarked image HI

Figure 1 Block diagram of the proposed watermark embedding process.

464 size MS of the watermark to be embedded in the image is restricted to the following Eq. (4): MSZ N!N bits: a!a 4
Is HI VQdecoded ? Yes Block Partition HBi s Seed K PRNG Watermarked image HI

H.-C. Wu, C.-C. Chang

No

PRNG

Seed K

Watermark retrieval procedure

This subsection is devoted to the watermark retrieval procedure of our new method. Just like VQ, we assume that both the sender and the receiver possess the same codebook for the transmitted watermarked image. Thus, the receiver can recover the compressed image with the indices and the codebook. The new digital watermarking technique proposed in this paper completes the watermark embedding process during VQ encoding. However, the embedded watermark still exists in the VQ decoded image and can be extracted exactly. Fig. 2 is the block diagram of the watermark retrieval procedure followed by the detailed steps. Step 1: If the watermark is extracted from the VQ decoded image go to Step 2, otherwise go to Step 3. Step 2: Segment the decompressed watermarked image into blocks of the same size with a ! a pixels. With the help of the secret key K to perform PRNG(K), select the blocks embedded with the watermark pixels and pick out the indices corresponding to the codewords in the codebook that are most similar to the selected blocks. Go to Step 4. Step 3: With the help of the secret key K to perform PRNG(K) and select the indices embedded with the watermark pixels. Step 4: In the codebook divisions, search for the divisions and codeword numbers corresponding to the selected indices. Then, recover the watermark WI with the number bits.

Selected encoded indices

Selected M M blocks Codebook CB VQ encoding Encoded indices Searching for the codebook division and codeword number for each index

Recovering each watermark bit by the corresponding codeword number

Extracted watermark image WI

Figure 2 Block diagram of the watermark retrieval procedure.

Codebook editing
Through a series of experiments, we have found that, following our method, the quality of the decompressed, watermarked image is worse than that processed by the VQ compression technique. The main reason is that when the watermark is being embedded, the number bits of some VQ encoded indices, which indicate the locations of the codewords in their divisions, are replaced with the watermark pixel values. Such a modication can lead to the use of the other codeword within the

same division due to the changed number. If the codewords within the same division are not similar enough, then the watermarked image will have a degraded image quality. Under such circumstances, in order to enhance the image quality, we must enhance the similarity among the codewords within the same division. In this paper, we also propose a method to edit the codebook so that the codeword similarity in the same division can be enhanced. First, we construct the codebook divisions following the same procedure found in Section Codebook Division. When the division is completed, we calculate the summation of the distances among the two codewords within the same division to determine whether or not these codewords are similar. This distance summation DS (CWx, CWy) of codewords CWx and CWy can be acquired by using Eq. (5).
a1 a1  XX CWx i; j CWy i; j: DS CWx ; CWy Z iZ0 jZ0

A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique Then, we compare the summation with a predened threshold TH. If the summation is greater than TH, it means that the codewords within the same division differ from each other too much, and, therefore, the division must be edited. On the contrary, if the summation is smaller than the threshold, then the similarity is proven, and there is no need for editing. When the similarity decision has been made, we can proceed with codebook editing that is directed toward the divisions whose codewords lack similarity. First of all, for each edited division, we calculate the average of each corresponding vector element of the two codewords. Then, by averaging all of the codewords within the division and the average of the vectors above, we can effectively increase the similarity of the codewords in the same division. To be more specic, let CWx Z CWx(i,j) and CWy Z CWy(i,j), where 1 % i, j % a, be the codewords in an edited division. The average of each vector element is AVG (i,j) Z (CWx(i,j) C CWy(i,j))/2. Next, the editing of codeword CWx is to set CWx(i,j) Z (CWx(i,j) C AVG (i,j))/2 for each i and j. In a similar way, each CWy(i,j) is set to be (CWy(i,j) C AVG (i,j ))/2. Fig. 3 shows the comparison result between the image qualities before and after codebook editing. The codebook used in this comparison is one with 256 codewords. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), dened by Eq. (6), was calculated to evaluate image quality between the two images. ! 2552 dB; MSE
N1 N1 P P iZ0 jZ0

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The higher the similarity, the higher the PSNR value will be, and vice versa. In Fig. 3, the codebook editing has the effect of enhancing the image quality. Also pay close attention to the fact that, in the codebook editing process we propose here, the decision on the predened threshold TS is based on experience. Too many factors e number of codewords in each division, length of codeword, etc. e complicate the summation of distances. Note that, although our new digital watermarking technique can be applied regardless of whether the codebook is private or public, the codebook has to be private before our codebook editing process can be launched. In other words, to edit the codebook, the sender has to transmit the codebook together with the indices to the receiver.

Experimental results
In this paper, the proposed digital watermarking technique completes the watermark embedding process during VQ encoding. However, the embedded watermark still exists in the VQ decoded image and can be extracted 100 percent intact. In this section, we will show the effectiveness of our new watermarking technique in resisting various destructive image processing attacks including cropping, blurring, sharpening, and JPEG lossy compression. In our experiments, the normalized correlation (NC) was obtained to help judge the robustness of the extracted watermark. The NC value can be anywhere between 0 and 1. The closer the NC value is to 1, the higher the accuracy is for the recovered watermark. The NC value of WI and WI# is dened as Eq. (7).

PSNRZ10 log10

1 where MSEZN2

Xi; j Xw i; j2 :

Figure 3 (a) Watermarked image without codebook editing, PSNR Z 30.97 dB (b) Watermarked image with codebook editing, PSNR Z 31.16 dB.

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Table 2 Codebook size adopted in our watermarking technique vs. watermarked image quality Codebook size (number 128 of codewords included) PSNR value (dB) 256 512 1024

29.43 30.97 32.00 32.62

Figure 4 (a) 512 ! 512 original image: Lena and (b) 64 ! 64 original watermark.
M1 M1 P P

WIi; jWI0 i; j : WIi; j

2

NCZ

iZ0 jZ0 M1 M1 P P iZ0 jZ0

In our experiments, the platform used was P-III 450 MHz, 256 MB RAM, and the operating system was Microsoft Windows 98, 2nd edition. The programming was done in Java 1.3. As for image processing, our software included Adobe Photoshop 5.02C and Ulead Photo Impact 5.0. The original image employed in our experiments is a 512 ! 512 gray-level image Lena, and the watermark was a 64 ! 64 binary image, both shown in Fig. 4. Also, the standard LBG was used to train a codebook that contained 256 codewords and to build up codebook divisions with every division containing two codewords. Table 1 is the experimental result of codebook editing with different threshold values TS. The results prove that, for a codebook with 256 codewords, when the threshold is set to be 140, the image has maximum performance in both image quality and robustness against blurring and sharpening.

the image quality should not be extensively damaged, or it would be easy to detect that the image had undergone a change. Table 2 shows the comparison made between different codebook sizes based on our technique as to their inuence upon the quality of the watermarked 512 ! 512 image Lena. Here, the tested codebooks were all trained by the standard LBG without being edited. In addition, a codebook division with every division consisting of two codewords was also invented for our experiments. Table 2 shows that the codebook size positively correlates to the image quality. In other words, if we use a larger codebook in our watermarking technique, then the watermarked image will have better image quality.

Effect of cropping attack

In this subsection, we discuss the ability of our watermarking technique to withstand a cropping attack. In our experiments, a codebook with 256 codewords was used, and the codebook editing threshold was set as 140. Our experiments were conducted on three separate conditions: (1) the watermarked image was cropped by one-fourth (shown in Fig. 5), (2) the watermarked image was cropped by one-half (shown in Fig. 6), and (3) the simulation indices were intercepted over the Internet (show in Fig. 7). From Figs. 5 and 6, we observe that the extracted watermarks are obviously distinguishable by the human eye when the cropped part is lled with white pixels. In Fig. 5, we nd that following our method, cropping a quarter of the watermarked image does not have much inuence on the image quality of the extracted watermark.

Analysis of image quality effected by codebook size

Due to the embedding of the watermark, the image quality is inevitably degraded. However,
Table 1

Different threshold values for codebook editing vs. image quality and robustness against attacks Threshold values 60 80 31.11 0.983 0.960 100 31.12 0.985 0.963 120 31.16 0.986 0.965 140 31.16 0.987 0.968 160 30.83 0.986 0.963 180 30.28 0.990 0.957 200 30.25 0.990 0.958 31.10 0.977 0.958

Experiments Image quality (PSNR) (dB) Blurring once (NC) Sharpening once (NC)

A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique

467

Figure 5

The quarter-cropped, watermarked image.

Compared to the results in Fig. 6, the recovered watermarks in Fig. 5 are all clearly recognizable with the NC values all above 0.7. The comparison makes it obvious that cropping one-half of the

watermarked image can do extensive damage to the recovered watermark. Fig. 7 shows the simulation where some of the index values were intercepted and deleted. Note

Figure 6

The half-cropped, watermarked image.

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Figure 7

Simulation of intercepted and deleted index.

that the deleted part was recovered as gray instead of white. This occurred because in the compressed image, when indices are deleted, the missing part is lled with the color white, which is represented by the value 255 in gray-level images. Therefore, when the image is recovered, the deleted part will be replaced and recovered with the codeword whose index value is 255. Finally, since the codeword indexed by 255 is directed towards the color gray, the missing part will be recovered as gray. As shown in Fig. 7, intercepted indices do not extensively harm our technique, and the recovered watermark can still be clearly identied.

Effect of JPEG attack

In this subsection, we describe the experiments we conducted to analyze the inuence of JPEG lossy compression on the watermarked image. The extracted watermarks after JPEG compression are shown in Fig. 8. Table 3 records our experimental data, and Tables 4 and 5 are adopted from Hsu and Wus research as well as from Niu et al.s research. From Tables 3, 4, and 5, we see that our

watermarking technique can obtain an extracted watermark with the NC value as high as 0.933 when the JPEG compression ratio is 1:12. Meanwhile, the other two watermarking techniques can only give NC values such as 0.413 and 0.603 when the compression ratios are 1:10.74 and 1:10.32, respectively. Such a high NC value under a high compression ratio is a proof that our technique is much more robust against JPEG lossy compression than the other two methods. The experiments described in this subsection have proved that the images processed by our method have not only been processed by VQ but can also resist a high ratio JPEG lossy compression. Therefore, our technique can effectively protect the intellectual property of images, whether they involve VQ compression or other public networks.

Discussions related to the robust performance of different-sized codebooks

In this subsection, we discuss the robust performance of different codebook sizes. LBG is also used to train codebooks with 128, 256, 512, and

The original watermark

Figure 8

NC=0.949 (a) Compression ratio=10.2

NC=0.910 (b) Compression ratio=12.0

NC=0.876 (c) Compression ratio=14.1

Watermarks extracted from the image Lena that has been processed by JPEG lossy compression.

A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique
Table 3 NC values of watermarks extracted from images compressed at different JPEG compression ratios Compression 10.0 ratio NC value 12.0 14.1 16.1 18.1 20.4

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Table 5 NC values of watermarks extracted from images compressed at different JPEG compression ratios (adopted from Niu et al. (2000)) Compression 1.44 ratio NC value 3.58 5.37 6.97 8.89 10.32

0.949 0.913 0.876 0.810 0.762 0.732

0.999 0.998 0.972 0.965 0.831 0.603

1024 codewords, respectively. In order to compare the robust performance of codebooks of different sizes, the codebook editing process is not included here for fear that different threshold values would complicate the description. Fig. 9 is a diagram that shows the robust performance of different-sized codebooks against a blurring attack. Fig. 10, on the other hand, deals with a sharpening attack. Observing Figs. 9 and 10, we nd that the robustness against blurring and sharpening attacks is generally in reverse proportion to the size of the codebook; that is to say, the watermarked image will have greater power to withstand attacks if it has fewer codewords (Tables 6 and 7). The reason for this is that codebooks of larger sizes have more detailed descriptions of the image features, and therefore errors in watermark recovery are more likely to happen because some of the original codewords may be different than those in the damaged images. On the contrary, codebooks of smaller sizes have relatively rougher descriptions of the images, and so the chances are higher that the original codewords can still be correctly drawn out from the divisions to recover the watermark. This can occur even when the images have been damaged and block pixels have been changed. Although codebooks with fewer codewords have greater power to resist attacks, we observe from the experiments in Section Analysis of image quality effected by codebook size that the images recovered by smaller codebooks are still of poorer quality. Therefore, we recommend that codebooks of 256 or 512 codewords be employed to put our watermarking system to use.

Security analysis
To analyze the performance of our new watermarking technique in terms of security, we discuss the following two aspects: index security and probability of unexpected hidden watermark deletion. As far as index security is concerned, since our technique does not embed the watermark in the LSBs of the index values, attackers cannot remove the watermark by deleting specic bits. Furthermore, because index values are composed of bunches of seemingly chaotic values, they have no meaning at all in the eyes of an attacker even though they are able to intercept the indices. If the indices were to be damaged, due to the irregularity of the index values, the quality of the decompressed image would be extremely bad, which would inform the receiver of the destruction of the index values. Under such circumstances, the receiver would ask for another transmission from the sender. As for the probability of unexpected hidden watermark deletion, since the watermark embedding in our method is done by picking out codebook divisions using the seed of a pseudorandom number generator, as long as the seed is big enough and well-protected, the embedded watermark would not be easily deleted.

Conclusions
VQ is an efcient and well-accepted image compression method. The new digital watermarking technique proposed in this paper takes advantage of VQ to embed a digital watermark in a VQ

Table 4 NC values of watermarks extracted from images compressed at different JPEG compression ratios (adopted from Hsu and Wu (1999)) Compression ratio NC value 3.49 0.999 4.41 0.998 5.18 0.998 5.92 0.99 6.55 0.942 7.16 0.883 7.81 0.83 8.46 0.726 9.05 0.661 9.81 0.493 10.74 0.413

470
1 0.95 0.9 0.85 0.8 0.75 128

H.-C. Wu, C.-C. Chang

NC value

one time two times three times 256 512 Number of codewords in codebook 1024

Figure 9

Diagram of robust performance of different-sized codebooks against blurring attacks.

1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5

NC value

one time two times three times 128 256 512 Number of codewords in codebook 1024

Figure 10

Diagram of robust performance of different-sized codebooks against sharpening attacks.

Table 6

NC values of retrieved watermarks from different-sized codebooks after blurring attacks Codebook with 128 codewords 256 codewords 0.993 0.945 0.884 512 codewords 0.992 0.929 0.875 1024 codewords 0.987 0.909 0.845

Blurring one time Blurring two times Blurring three times

0.993 0.956 0.906

Table 7

NC values of retrieved watermarks from different-sized codebooks after sharpening attacks Codebook with 128 codewords 256 codewords 0.976 0.851 0.680 512 codewords 0.959 0.808 0.620 1024 codewords 0.964 0.800 0.571

Sharpening one time Sharpening two times Sharpening three times

0.968 0.870 0.714

compressed image and retrieve a watermark from a VQ compressed/decompressed watermarked image. Our watermarking technique, in comparison with many other current techniques, performs better in attacks related to robustness. Therefore, our technique is practical as well as effective in protecting the intellectual property of images. The new technique embeds the watermark in an image that has already been compressed, which can save transmission time and storage space when the image is being passed through networks. Also note that the watermarked image is already in the compressed form. The effect of watermark recovery is still impressive even if the watermarked image becomes compressed again via JPEG

lossy compression. Therefore, our watermarking technique is quite suitable for intellectual property protection applications on the Internet.

References
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A novel digital image watermarking scheme based on the vector quantization technique
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Voyatzis G, Pitas I. Protecting digital-image copyrights: a framework. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 1999;1: 18e24. Hsien-Chu Wu was born in Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China, on October 26, 1962. She received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Applied Mathematics in 1985 and 1987, respectively, from the National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Engineering in 2002 from National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan. From 1987 to 2002, she was a lecturer of the Department of Information Management at National Taichung Institute Technology, Taichung, Taiwan. Since August 2002, she has worked as an Associate Professor of the Department of Information Management at National Taichung Institute Technology, Taichung, Taiwan. Her research interests include image authentication, digital watermarking, data hiding, image processing and information security. Chin-Chen Chang was born in Taichung, Taiwan, the Republic of China, on November 12, 1954. He received his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics in 1977 and his M.S. degree in Computer and Decision Sciences in 1979 from National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in 1982 from National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. From 1983 to 1989, he was among the faculty of the Institute of Applied Mathematics, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. Since August 1989, he has worked as a Professor of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan. Dr. Chang is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of the Chinese Language Computer Society, the Chinese Institute of Engineers of the Republic of China, and the Phi Tau Phi Society of the Republic of China. His research interests include computer cryptography, data engineering, and image compression.