Copyright Protection through Digital Watermarking

Author(s):  
Farook Sattar ◽  
Dan Yu

Today, the Internet is a worldwide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. With the rapid evolution of digital networks, digital libraries and World Wide Web (WWW) services, the convenient broadcasting or exposition of digital products on the global network leads easily to illegal copying, modifying and retransmission. The Internet has spawned many copyright issues involving multimedia content distribution. Let’s say an owner would like to sell or distribute a work to legal/registered users only. If the work were subsequently copied/redistributed illegally, how could the owner find who was responsible? Cryptographic techniques provide an effective solution for securing the delivery process and controlling the use of the contents that an user has obtained. However, with flawless transmission through the network, the contents after decryption are exactly the same as the original data. The contents can be copied perfectly infinite times. A user can also manipulate the contents. Digital watermarking (Arnold, Schmucker, & Wolthusen, 2003; Katzenbeisser & Petitcolas, 2000) offers a way to counter copyright piracy on global networks that are not solvable by cryptography. It provides proof and tracking capabilities to illegal copying and distribution of multimedia information. Most existing digital watermarking schemes are based on some assumptions for watermark detection and extraction. Some schemes require the previous knowledge of watermark locations, strengths or some thresholds. In some algorithms, the watermark is estimated with the help of the original watermark information. To ensure the robustness and invisibility of the watermark, the optimum embedding locations are usually different for different images. For a large image database, it could be a disadvantage to require watermark location and strength information for watermark detection and extraction. A large amount of information then needs to be stored. On the Internet, an owner would like to distribute multimedia data by signing different watermarks to different users in order to prevent illegal redistribution of the data by a legal user. In this scenario, watermark detection and extraction algorithms requiring information of either watermark embedding locations and strengths or the original watermark should fail, since one does not know exactly which watermark is embedded in a particular copy of the watermarked image. To this end, we present a new blind watermarking scheme (Yu, Sattar, & Ma, 2002; Yu & Sattar, 2003, 2005) based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) (Hyvarinen, 1999; Hyvärinen & Oja, 1999; Lee, 1998) for color images, which can overcome existing problems of watermark detection and extraction as described above. The new ICA-based scheme is found to be efficient in the application of data tracking/tracing for multimedia distribution through the Internet against other digital watermarking schemes. By adopting this ICA-based watermarking scheme, an efficient multimedia distribution framework/protocol for copyright protection can be accomplished. This article is organized as follows: The watermark embedding and extraction algorithms for color image watermarking using the new ICA-based scheme are presented next, followed by a discussion and comments on the results, security issues, summary and future works.

2013 ◽  
Vol 310 ◽  
pp. 650-655
Author(s):  
Yun Fei Jiang ◽  
Yong Gang Fu

Copyright protection has drawn much attentions especially in the advent of computer and the internet. Illagal copying of digital multimedia has been much easier because of widely using of the modern technologies.This paper proposes a novel digital watermarking algorithm based on the numbers of the blocked middle DCT positive and negative coefficients. Embedding watermark into the middle frequency of DCT is a perfect idea and it can receive a trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility.We utilized the embedding strength to get a balance between their robustness and imperceptibility. The results show that the algorithm is robust to print and scan process.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 4040-4046

Internet based digitization has been of rapid increase in the usage of database applications at an enormous rate in recent times. It is very difficult to secure the ownership of digital assets because all the data on the internet are available everywhere almost free of cost and anybody can access such data and claim their ownership. In current digital scenario not only images, videos, and audio are in digital form. Databases are also digitized in different models and used as a service in database applications, including areas such as finance, multimedia, personnel, etc. A huge amount of confidential and sensitive data which are available publically facing a variety of threats like illegal copying, illegal redistribution, tampering, forgery and authentication. Authenticity, integrity, confidentiality and copyright protection are most important security issues to be addressed with most importance. Copyright management is a serious issue in database applications because it is much easier for others to download and manipulate copyrighted databases from the Internet and later re-use without any control. In this paper we proposed a robust watermarking scheme for copyright protection for relational databases, which protects the copy right information of the database even if the attacker tampers the data by changing the attribute values or reordering the tuples of the database. The proposed watermarking technique is robust since the watermark will not be lost even though the attacker tampers the data. The experiments show that the new method is efficient as well as effective for maintaining copy right information there by ensuring right protection to relational databases


2013 ◽  
Vol 321-324 ◽  
pp. 2609-2612
Author(s):  
Yan Liang ◽  
Gao Yan ◽  
Chun Xia Qi

Digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution to the problem of copyright protection of multimedia data in a networked environment. It makes possible to tightly associated to a digital document a code allowing the identification of the data creator, owner, authorized consumer, and so on. In this paper a new DCT-domain system for digital watermarking algorithm for digital images is presented: the method, which operates in the frequency domain, embeds a pseudo-random sequence of scrambled image in a selected set of DCT coefficients. After embedding, the watermark is adapted to the image by exploiting the masking characteristics of the human visual system, thus ensuring the watermark invisibility. By exploiting the statistical properties of the embedded sequence, the mark can be reliably extracted without resorting to the original uncorrupted image. Experimental results demonstrate that the watermark is robust to several signal processing techniques, including JPEG compression, cut, fuzzy, addition of noise, and sharpen.


2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming-Chiang Hu ◽  
Der-Chyuan Lou ◽  
Ming-Chang Chang

Author(s):  
V. Santhi ◽  
D. P. Acharjya

Advances in technologies facilitate the end users to carry out unauthorized manipulation and duplication of multimedia data with less effort. Because of these advancements, the two most commonly encountered problems are (1) copyright protection and (2) unauthorized manipulation of multimedia data. Thus a scheme is required to protect multimedia data from those two above said problems. Digital Watermarking is considered as one of the security mechanisms to protect copyrights of multimedia data. The literature review reveals that the calculation of scaling and embedding parameters are not completely automated. In order to automate the procedure of calculating scaling and embedding parameters the computational intelligence need to be incorporated in the watermarking algorithm. Moreover the quality of the watermarked images could also be preserved by combining computational intelligence concepts. Thus watermarking schemes utilizing computational intelligence concepts could be called as intelligence based watermarking schemes and it is presented in this chapter in detail.


Author(s):  
Dan Yu ◽  
Farook Sattar

This chapter focuses on the issue of transaction tracking in multimedia distribution applications through digital watermarking terminology. The existing watermarking schemes are summarized and their assumptions as well as the limitations for tracking are analyzed. In particular, an Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based watermarking scheme is proposed, which can overcome the problems of the existing watermarking schemes. Multiple watermarking technique is exploited—one watermark to identify the rightful owner of the work and the other one to identify the legal user of a copy of the work. In the absence of original data, watermark, embedding locations and strengths, the ICA-based watermarking scheme is introduced for efficient watermark extraction with some side information. The robustness of the proposed scheme against some common signal-processing attacks as well as the related future work are also presented. Finally, some challenging issues in multimedia transaction tracking through digital watermarking are discussed.


2013 ◽  
pp. 691-712
Author(s):  
Dumitru Dan Burdescu ◽  
Liana Stanescu ◽  
Marian Cristian Mihaescu

The rapid growth of digital multimedia technologies brings tremendous attention to the field of digital authentication. Digital watermarking has become widely recognized as an effective measure for copyright protection of multimedia data. The owner or the distributor of the digital images can insert a unique watermark into copies for different customers or receivers, which will be helpful to identify the source of illegal copies. In this chapter the authors present two original spatial authentication techniques for digital images. These new algorithms yield an invisible watermark that is robust to various kinds of attacks. The main principle is the utilization of a virtual (2D or 3D) graph embedded into the digital images. Then, the colors of some vertices of the virtual graph are slightly modified for obtaining the watermark. The proposed techniques modify pixels or voxels of the object by a spatial watermark insertion scheme. These techniques can be used for all kinds of digital images, color or black and white, and the new algorithms produce an invisible robust watermark. The techniques lower the computational complexity that normally rises with the traditional watermarking algorithms. This approach reduces computation and implementation complexity of the algorithms. These techniques seem to replace advantages of the transform domain techniques with those of the spatial domain techniques.


Author(s):  
Kuanchin Chen

Sharing, disseminating, and presenting data in digital format is not just a fad, but it is becoming part of our life. Without careful planning, digitized resources could easily be misused, especially those that are shared across the Internet. Examples of such misuse include use without the owner’s permission, and modification of a digitized resource to fake ownership. One way to prevent such behaviors is to employ some form of copyright protection technique, such as digital watermarks. Digital watermarks refer to the data embedded into a digital source (e.g., images, text, audio, or video recording). They are similar to watermarks in printed materials as a message inserted into the host media typically becomes an integral part of the media. Apart from traditional watermarks in printed forms, digital watermarks may also be invisible, may be in the forms other than graphics, and may be digitally removed.


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