A Feature-Based Robust Digital Image

Watermarking Scheme
M. Hemahlathaa
Department of Computer Science,
Anna University, Chennai-24

Abstract-The effectiveness of a digital

watermarking algorithm is indicated by the
robustness of embedded watermarks
against various attacks. Improving the
robustness of a watermark so as to
withstand attacks has been one of the main
research objectives in digital image
watermarking. The two issues of existing
feature-based schemes that have to be
addressed are: one is avoiding repeated
selection
of
robust
regions
for
watermarking to resist similar attacks, and
the other is the difficulty of selecting the
most robust and smallest feature region set
to be watermarked. In order to achieve
robustness, an overall architecture for a
feature-based
robust
digital
image
watermarking scheme is designed. A
simulated attacking procedure is performed
using predefined attacks to evaluate the
robustness of every candidate feature
region selected. Comparing with some wellknown feature-based methods, the proposed
method exhibits better performance in
robust digital watermarking.
Keywords- Generic algorithm, geometric distortions,
robust digital watermarking, simulated attacking.

I. INTRODUCTION
Digital watermarking technology is
mainly applied on the following: copyright
protection, operation tracking or piracy
tracking, image authentication and copy
control, in which copyright protection is the
most important application. As one of the
most popular and viable techniques in
protecting copyrights in digital media,
watermarking technology has received
enormous level of attention of researchers and
practitioners alike. Unfortunately, due to the
same reason, watermarking technology has

C.Chellppan
Department of Computer Science,
Anna University, Chennai-24

also attracted the attentions of hackers and

criminals alike who are interested in breaking
the watermarks in order to crack the copyright
protection system. As a result, there is a
constant challenge on the researchers to keep
improving the robustness of the watermarking
technique.
Attacks which attempt to destroy or
invalidate watermarks can be classified into
two types, noise-like signal processing and
geometric distortions. Attacks of the first type
intend to remove embedded watermarks from
the cover image by a signal processing
approach. The second type of attack, which
results in synchronization errors by geometric
distortions, makes a detector fail to detect the
existence of watermarks even if they are still
on the image.
A watermarked feature region may
have different degrees of robustness against
different attacks. It would be helpful to find
out the most robust regions if there is prior
knowledge of each regions attack resistance
capability. As a result, we propose a feature
region selection method based on the idea of
simulated attacking. This method can be
integrated into the feature-based watermarking
schemes to enhance their robustness against
various types of attack.
The remainder of this paper is
organised as follows. In Section II, we discuss
the basic information about digital image
watermarking system. In Section III, the
overall block diagram of the proposed system
is discussed in brief. A critical analysis of
watermark attacks is given in Section IV.
Section V explains the primary feature set
searching stage. A feature set extension stage
is presented in Section VI. The concluding
remarks are drawn in Section VII.

Figure 1. General process of Digital Image Watermarking System

II. DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING

SYSTEM
Figure 1 depicts the general process of
feature-based digital image watermarking
methods. The watermark sequence is
embedded into the feature regions in the
watermark insertion phase. The embedding
procedure can be defined as a superposition of
the digital watermark signal onto the original
image. Feature detectors perform specific
transformations on digital images to extract
their local features, ranging from a point to an
object, and have been adopted in many
applications such as object recognition,
database retrieval, and motion tracking.
Extracting the watermark can be divided into
two phases: locating the watermark and
recovering the watermark information. Two
kinds of extraction are available: using the
original document and in the absence of the
original document.
III. SELECTION OF OPTIMAL FEATURE
REGION SET
An overall architecture for the
proposed system is shown in Figure 2. The
simulated attacking procedure along with the
primary feature set searching stage is
responsible to find out a minimal feature
region set under the objective of resisting as
many predefined attacks as possible. Here, a
track-with-pruning algorithm is developed to
search for the optimal solution. In the feature
extension stage, the primary feature set is

extended by a genetic algorithm-based search

procedure to enhance its robustness to
undefined attacks.
IV. SIMULATED ATTACKING
A few representative attacks are
applied to the watermarked feature regions in
the simulated attacking phase. The simulated
attacking procedure using pre-defined attacks
is used to evaluate the robustness of every
candidate feature region. By performing the
pre-defined attacks on the watermarked image,
the region being attacked by the attacks can be
found out easily, because the watermark
attacks generally concentrate on specific
regions only. The knowledge of watermark
attacks would provide a valuable insight into
the design of a more robust digital image
watermarking technique.
The watermark attacks are mainly
classified into four different categories.
Removal attacks aim at the complete removal
of the watermark information from the
watermarked data without cracking the
security of the watermarking algorithm.
Geometric attacks do not actually remove the
embedded watermark itself, but intend to
distort the watermark detector synchronization
with the embedded information. Protocol
attacks aim at attacking the entire concept of
the watermarking application. Cryptographic
attacks aim at cracking the security methods in
watermarking schemes and thus finding a way
to remove the embedded watermark
information.

Figure 2. Block diagram of Proposed Feature region Selector

V. CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF
WATERMARK ATTACKS
Gaussian smoothing attack averages
the value of pixels over an area using
weighting coefficients derived from a
Gaussian function. An observation on the
image histogram of the Gaussian smoothed
images shows that as the width of the
histogram decreases and the peak of the
histogram increases as the level of the
smoothing increases. This phenomenon is an
indication that smoothing reduces the variation
in the image pixel values [1].
Histogram equalization attack works
by reducing the number of unique grey values
an image and reshape the histogram to
approximate a uniform distribution. In effect,
histogram equalization is controlled by
adjusting the desired number of unique grey
values [2]. Salt and pepper noise is another
example of statistical noise with a very
different probability density function (PDF).
Its PDF takes the form of two impulse
functions at two discrete locations [3].
Median Filtering aims at reducing the
presence of noise in an image, hence
enhancing the image quality. Median filter

produces a conflicting outcome in spatial and

frequency domain. In spatial domain, it
produces lower variation pixel values, but in
frequency domain it seems to have increased
the frequency components of the image [4].
The amount of blur is computed by average
edge-spread in the image, or more specifically,
it is measured by the average extent of the
slopes spread of an edge in gradients direction
and also its opposing direction [5]. Therefore
the edge-spread indicates the amount of blur
exhibited by each edge pixel.
Image sharpening can be seen as the
opposite of image smoothing. The process is
achieved in the frequency domain by using a
high pass filter, which intensifies the high
frequency components in the Fourier spectrum
[6]. A high pass filter H(w) is obtained from its
low pass filter L(w) counterpart and calculated
using H(w) = 1 L(w) formula in the
frequency domain.
Gaussian noise is statistical noise that
has a probability density function of the zero
mean normal distribution. The power of the
noise is controlled by varying the width of the
normal distribution. The wider the width the
more variation the noise value takes [7]. A

direct comparison between the original

watermarked image and the most severely
attacked watermarked image show a
significant change in the spectrum shape
especially in the high frequency region [8].
The Set removal attack can remove the
embedded watermarks with few visual
impacts. In order to increase the robustness,
several copies of the same watermark are
embedded in the embedding bit-plane. In the
extracting process, the highest obtained value
as the degree of the similarity between the
original watermark image (W) and the attacked
watermark image (W) is considered [11].
Self-Similarity attack erases the
watermark while granting the best Peak Signal
to Noise Ratio (PSNR) between the
watermarked image and the attacked one.
Here, the correlation between the different
parts of the image is taken into account [12].
The Blind signal separation attack regards the
watermark system as a black box by assuming
watermark signal as different kinds of noise,
instead of using the prior knowledge of the
watermark signal and embedding methods. To
estimate the original image data, blind
estimation and a MIMO linear channel are
introduced [13].
VI. PRIMARY FEATURE SET
SEARCHING STAGE
The attack resistance analysis phase is
applied by a two-step procedure. As an initial
step, the original feature regions are first tested
if they can be re-detected in the attacked
image. The watermark Wr embedded in each
positively redetected region is then extracted
to inspect the consistency (bit error) amongst
the original watermark and itself. Using dr, a
to indicate whether the region r can resist the
predefined attack a or not, it is defined as
dr, a =

1, BER(W, Wr) T
0, otherwise

In the final step, the most robust and

smallest set of nonoverlapping feature regions
is selected according to the result of attack
resistance analysis. This work is formulated as
follows:

= arg max Rp

min |Rp |

rk , rj Rp, k j rk rj =
where Rp is the set of selected feature regions
in which any two regions rk and rj are not
overlapped, and the value of
predefined attack is determined by

1,

r Rp, dr, ai 0

0,

otherwise

for a

The projected process aims at picking

the fewest regions from those found by a
feature detector to accomplish the greatest
robustness. The most important feature region
set and the pruned feature region set are
initialized as null, and the number of examined
feature regions is set as one. An iterative
search is carried out for determining the
primary feature set. The candidate feature
region sets with the cardinality equal to current
values are selected from the power set of the
set of detected feature regions. Besides, each
of them is satisfied with two conditions: 1) all
feature regions are nonoverlapped and 2) all
elements of its power set are not in the pruned
set. A candidate set is allocated as the new
primary feature set if it increases the number
of resisted attacks. On the other hand, a
candidate set is contained within the pruned
feature region set while there is no further
attack resisted after adding new feature regions
to the set. The early pruning mechanism and
the constraint of nonoverlapping between
feature regions would reduce computation
time significantly because of diminishing
impossible sets quickly. Finally, the
implementation ranges the desired number of
resisted attacks.
VII. FEATURE SET EXTENSION STAGE
As an extension to the earlier phase,
an optimal feature region set is selected to
resist predefined attacks on watermarking.
Moreover to resist some non-predefined
attacks, auxiliary regions are carefully chosen
from the residual feature regions. This
augments the robustness of watermarked
image against indefinite attacks and preserves
its visual quality. Since the appearances of
undefined attacks are of extensive variant and
are problematic to model, we therefore
implement a multi-criteria optimization

approach for the selection of auxiliary feature

regions. At first, an assumption that the feature
regions which last more types of predefined
attacks are more probable to resist undefined
attacks is applied. The symbol
is defined
to point out the complete resistance degree of
the region r against all predefined attacks, and
it is determined by

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

= ( d r, a1 + d r, a2 + . . . + d r,a Na ) =
[12]

where dr, ai {0,1} and specifies if the region

r can resist the ith predefined attack ai , and Na
is the overall total of predefined attacks. The
resistance of a region against a predefined
attack is viewed as a possible characteristic of
is the summary
the region. The symbol
depiction of Na characteristics of a region.
VIII. CONCLUSION
A novel technique centred on the
simulated attacking approach is developed to
select the most adequate feature regions for
robust digital image watermarking under the
limitation of preserving image quality. In
comparison
with
other
feature-based
watermarking methods, the robustness against
various attacks is significantly improved by
the proposed method, and the image quality
after watermarking is well-preserved.
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