On robustness against JPEG2000: a performance evaluation of wavelet-based watermarking techniques

Abstract

With the emergence of new scalable coding standards, such as JPEG2000, multimedia is stored as scalable coded bit streams that may be adapted to cater network, device and usage preferences in multimedia usage chains providing universal multimedia access. These adaptations include quality, resolution, frame rate and region of interest scalability and achieved by discarding least significant parts of the bit stream according to the scalability criteria. Such content adaptations may also effect the content protection data, such as watermarks, hidden in the original content. Many wavelet-based robust watermarking techniques robust to such JPEG2000 compression attacks are proposed in the literature. In this paper, we have categorized and evaluated the robustness of such wavelet based image watermarking techniques against JPEG2000 compression, in terms of algorithmic choices, wavelet kernel selection, subband selection, or watermark selection using a new modular framework. As most of the algorithms uses a different set of parametric combination, this analysis is particularly useful to understand the effect of various parameters on the robustness under a common platform and helpful to design any such new algorithm. The analysis also considers the imperceptibility performance of the watermark embedding, as robustness and imperceptibility are two main watermarking properties, complementary to each other.

Quality Scalability Aware Watermarking for Visual Content

“…However the algorithm ensures that the robustness is within permissible limit. The interpretation of Hamming distances for practical use is discussed in [24] which proposed that H < 0.2 ensures correct extraction of the watermark.…”

“…In this section we compare our proposed algorithm with a popular blind requantization based watermarking scheme (non-scalable) used in [9]- [11] and [14]. These algorithms share a common embedding model [24] which rely on modifying various coefficients towards a specific quantization step. Herein we call it the existing algorithm.…”

“…Often the same watermarking algorithms have been naively extended to propose watermarking algorithms robust against scalable content adaptation attacks, e.g., JPEG2000. Example of such image watermarking algorithms e.g., [7], [11]- [15], [24]- [30]. As the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is the underlying technology of the JPEG2000 compression standard, we consider the watermarking schemes that use wavelet-based techniques in addition to the algorithms mentioned above.…”

“…c) Optimising the Host Coefficient Selection: e.g., choosing all coefficients in a subband [8], [13]; using a threshold based on their magnitude significance [7]; the just noticeable difference(JND) [12]; a mask based on the Human Visual System (HVS) model [8]; a fusion rulebased mask for refining the selection of host coefficients [15] and blind re-quantization of a coefficient with respect to a group of coefficients within a given window [9]- [11], [14]. An in-depth review of the above schemes with respect to robustness to scalable content adaptation can be found in [24]. None of these algorithms can guarantee correct watermark extraction from the adapted (scaled) content, as they do not have access to scaling information during embedding.…”

Advances in digital media security and right management

“…Finally, the last paper [11] focuses on categorization and evaluation of the robustness of wavelet-based image watermarking techniques against JPEG2000 compression. Authors propose a new modular framework for this purpose that incorporates algorithmic choices, wavelet kernel, subband or watermark selection.…”