Multiple watermarking schemes for copyright protection

Abstract

Recent advances in digital communication and storage technologies have brought major changes for consumers. High capacity hard disks and DVDs can store a huge amount of audiovisual data. In addition, faster Internet connection speeds and emerging high bit rate DSL connection provide sufficient bandwidth for entertainment networks. These improvements in computer networks and communication technology are changing the economies of intellectual property reproduction and distribution. Intellectual property owners must exploit the new ways reproducing, distributing, and marketing their intellectual property. However a major problem with current digital distribution is the great threat of piracy. Digital watermarking is proposed as a solution to avoid digital piracy. <p/>In this work we have addressed multiple watermarking to increase robustness requirement for copyright protection and ownership prevention. Taking into account the scenarios for the present content distribution environment, we do rely on sending and distributing the content through physical channels along with digital network communication and distribution. We may publish the content in some newspapers and/or magazines etc. According to our belief there are very few techniques that are highly robust against unintentional image processing like print-scan, dithering that are routinely performed during publication of an image along with the conventional attacks that are performed on digital representation of an image. We have developed two techniques; one is “Multiple Watermarking using feature selection” and the other is “Multiple Watermarking in Hybrid SVD-DCT domain”. Both the techniques are highly robust against various attacks including JPEG-Lossy compression, Blurring, Median filtering, Rotation, Cropping, Scaling, Rescaling, Histogram Equalization, Intensity Adjustment, Gamma Correction, Gaussian Noise Addition, Salt & Pepper Noise Addition, Uniform Noise Addition, Dithering, Print & Rescan, Intentional Tampering, Pixelate etc. Imperceptibility, Security and Reliability of Detection are also satisfied by the proposed techniques.