Visible Watermarking Techniques for Digital Images

- A Review Study
vsanthi@vit.ac.in
Saraswathi.M. V. Santhi
School of Computing Science and Associate Professor
Engineering School of Computing Science and
VIT University Engineering
Vellore, India VIT University
Vellore, India
Saraswathi2783@gmail.com
ABSTRACT - The decoder and comparator (detection
The advent of the Internet has resulted in many new algorithm).
opportunities for the creation and delivery of content in digital
form. An important issue that arises in these applications is the EMBEDDINGG AND EXTRACTION PROCESS
protection of the rights of all participants. This has led to an The process of watermarking a host signal is usually
interest towards developing protection mechanisms known as referred to as embedding a message in the host signal. Let us
Digital Watermarking. A visible watermark may convey denote an image by I, a signature by S and the watermarked
ownership information that identifies the originator of image image by W. E is an embedding function, it takes an image I and
and video. a signature S, and it generates a new image (W) which is called
The purpose of this review paper is to study the concepts of watermarked image. [3]
digital watermarking and visible watermarking images. To study
Original
how visible watermarking is implemented in different domain Image(I) Watermark
Watermarked
and in different ways. Embedder
Image (W)

Keywords
Digital Watermarking, Visible Watermarking.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Digital Watermarking
With the growing popularity of digital Medias through the
World Wide Web, intellectual property needs copyright
protection, prevention of illegal copying and verification of
content integrity. One way for copyright protection is
digital watermarking[1].Digital watermarking is
defined as a process of embedding data, called
a watermark, into a multimedia objects(host
signal) such that the embedded watermark can
be detected or extracted later to make an
assertion about the objects. The multimedia
Signature(S)
EXTRACTION PROCESS
The process of reading the message at the receiver side is
usually referred to as detecting a message from the received
signal. A extraction function D takes an image J whose
ownership is to be determined and recovers a signature from the
image. In this process an additional image I can also be included
which is often the original and unwatermarked version of J. This
is due to the fact that some encoding schemes may make use of
the original images in the watermarking process to provide extra
robustness against intentional and unintentional corruption of
pixels. The extracted signature will then be compared with the
owner signature sequence by a comparator function and a binary
output decision generated. It is 1 if there is match and 0
otherwise.[3]
Original
Image(I) Extraction
Binary Output(0/1)

objects can be text, image, audio, video and Process Comparator

their compositions. If the host signal is represented by

x and the watermarked signal by y, then the watermark, Watermarked Original signature
represented by w, is defined as w , y − x, i.e., the difference Image(j)

between the watermarked and the host signal. A simple

example of a digital watermark would be a visible seal TYPES OF DIGITAL WATERMARKS
placed over an image to identify the copyright. However Watermarks and watermarking techniques can be divided into
the watermark might contain additional information various categories in various ways. According to working
including the identity of the purchaser of a particular copy domain watermarking is divided into frequency domain and
of the material. [2] spatial domain. Watermarking techniques can be divided into
General Framework for Watermarking four categories according to the type of document to be
In general, any watermarking scheme (algorithm) consists watermarked as follows.
of three parts. * Image Watermarking * Video Watermarking
- The watermark. *Audio Watermarking *Text Watermarking
- The encoder (insertion algorithm).
According to the human perception, the digital watermarks can
be divided into three different types as follows.
· Visible watermark
· Invisible-Robust watermark
· Invisible-Fragile watermark
In visible watermarking, the information is visible in the picture
or video. Typically, the information is text or a logo which
identifies the owner of the media. . When a television
broadcaster adds its logo to the corner of transmitted video, this
is also a visible watermark.
In invisible watermarking, information is added as digital data
to audio, picture or video, but it cannot be perceived. The
invisible-robust watermark is embedded in such a way that an
alternation made to the pixel value is perceptually not noticed
and it can be recovered only with appropriate decoding
mechanism. The invisible-fragile watermark is embedded in
such a way that any manipulation or modification of the image
would alter or destroy the watermark.[2]
Properties of Watermarks
There are a number of measurable characteristics that a
watermark should exhibit. These include that it should be
difficult to notice, robust to common distortions of the signal,
resistant to malicious attempts to remove the watermark,
support a sufficient data rate commensurate with these
application, allow multiple watermarks to be added and that the
decoder be scalable.[4]
Applications of Digital Watermarking
Digital watermarking techniques have wide ranging
applications. Some of the applications are enlisted below.[2]
• Copyright Protection: Digital watermarks can be used to
identify and protect copyright ownership.
• Copy Protection: Digital content can be watermarked to
indicate that the content cannot be illegally replicated.
• Tracking: Digital watermarks can be used to track the usage of
digital content. Each copy of digital content can be uniquely
watermarked with metadata specifying the authorized users of
the content. Such watermarks can be used to detect illegal
replication of content by identifying the users who replicated the
content illegally. The watermarking technique used for tracking
is called as fingerprinting.
• Tamper Proofing: Digital watermarks, which are fragile in
nature, can be used for tamper proofing. Digital content can be
embedded with fragile watermarks that get destroyed whenever
any sort of modification is made to the content. Such
watermarks can be used to authenticate the content.
• Broadcast Monitoring: Digital watermarks can be used to
monitor broadcasted content like television and broadcast radio
signals. Advertising companies can use systems that can detect
the broadcast of advertisements for billing purposes by
identifying the watermarks broadcast along with the content.
Attacks on watermarking systems
The different types of watermarking systems include common
signal processing, geometric and other intentional attacks.[18]
Filtering
The marketed image may undergo several filtering operations
in the course of enhancement techniques. Such filtering
operations include low pass, high pass, median or Gaussian
filtering. It is absolutely necessary for the watermarked
information to be resistant to all such filtering processes.
Rescaling
The watermark is also prone to be distorted or lost while the
marketed image is rescaled.
Cropping
A common editing operation is the spatial rejection of a portion
of the marketed image. Such an operation is also considered to
be a serious threat to the watermarked information. This is a
very important consideration when the watermarking is done in
the spatial domain. This requires the watermarked information
to be embedded in those areas of the original image which are
significant, and if cropped away results in severe degradation of
the actual image.
Jitter Attack
A simple and yet devastating attack on the watermark is to add a
bit of jitter to the signal. In cases where the lower order bits are
used to carry the watermark information, such an attack can
totally destroy the hidden data.
1.2. Visible Watermarking
Visible watermarking is a type of digital watermarking used for
protection of publicly available images [6]. Visible
watermarking schemes are important intellectual property rights
(IPR) protection mechanisms for digital images and videos that
have to be released for certain purposes but illegal reproductions
of them are prohibited. Visible watermarking techniques protect
digital contents in a more active manner, which is quite different
from the invisible watermarking techniques. Digital data
embedded with visible watermarks will contain recognizable but
unobtrusive copyright patterns, and the details of the host data
should still exist. The embedded pattern of a useful visible
watermarking scheme should be difficult or even impossible to
be removed unless intensive and expensive human labors are
involved. [19]
In visible watermarking, the information is visible in
the picture or video. Typically, the information is text or a logo
which identifies the owner of the media. A television
broadcaster adds its logo to the corner of transmitted video; this
is also a visible watermark. Visible watermarking has been more
popular in the case of protecting digital images due to the fact
that it allows users to easily identify their content due to the
property of the scheme without the need for an explicit
extractor. This also allows owners to prevent the unauthorized
usage of their images [12]. Visible watermarks change the signal
altogether such that the watermarked signal is totally different
from the actual signal, e.g., adding an image as a watermark to
another image. Stock photography agencies often add a
watermark in the shape of a copyright symbol ("©") to previews
of their images, so that the previews do not substitute for high-
quality copies of the product included with a license. [18]
The main advantage of using a visible watermark is that
they convey an immediate claim of ownership, providing credit
to the owner. It also prevents or at least discourages
unauthorized use of copyrighting high quality images. Such
deterrence is considered useful which is evidenced by the
common practice of the use of a visible watermark in television
broadcasting where the channel logo is translucently placed at
the corner of the screen image. It also serves the dual purpose of
providing a recognizable identity to the content. [10].
• The ease of adding a visible watermark to an image
often makes it a palatable option.
• This type of watermarks is easily viewable without
any mathematical calculation.
• Adding an invisible watermark to an image is often
much more complicated than adding a visible
watermark, although a number of available software
 packages perform the necessary operations
automatically.
• Only visible watermarking will not with stand general
image processing attacks (particularly watermark is
completely removed by cropping the visible
information). In such cases spreading the visible
watermark all over the original image solves the above
problem.
Three major requirements for visible watermarking:
1. Visibility: The watermark must be easily identified.
2. Transparency: The watermark must not significantly obscure
the image details beneath it.
3. Robustness: The original pixels in the watermarked areas
should not be easily recovered. [7]
Characteristics of visible watermarks:
• A visible watermark should be obvious in both color and
monochrome images.
• The watermark should be spread in a large or important area
of the image in order to prevent its deletion by clipping. The
watermark should be visible yet must not significantly
obscure the image details beneath it.
• The watermark must be difficult to remove; removing a
watermark should be more costly and labor intensive than
purchasing the image from the owner.
• The watermark should be applied automatically with little
human intervention and labor.[6]
Visible watermarks can be used in following cases:
Visible watermarking for enhanced copyright protection.
In such situations, where images are made available through
Internet and the content owner is concerned that the images will
be used commercially (e.g. imprinting coffee mugs) without
payment of royalties. Here the content owner desires an
ownership mark, that is visually apparent, but which does not
prevent image being used for other purposes.
Visible watermarking used to indicate ownership originals.
In this case images are made available through the Internet and
the content owner desires to indicate the ownership of the
underlying materials (library manuscript), so an observer might
be encouraged to patronize the institutions that own the
material.[12]
2. REVIEW STUDY ON VISIBLE
WATERMARKING IMAGES
A number of techniques have been proposed for embedding and
extracting a watermark in a digital image using visible
watermarking. A review has been done on the same area and it
is given briefly below.
Yip et al.[13] proposed the importance of lossless visible
watermarking. Since visible watermarking produces more
distortion, lossless property is introduced such that the original
image is recovered perfectly during extraction with less
distortion. In this paper watermark is inserted to the host image
using lossless visible algorithms, Pixel Value Matching
Algorithm(PVMA) and Pixel Position Shift Algorithm(PPSA).
In PVMA the watermark is embedded to the host image using a
mapping function. PVMA treats both the low variance region
and high variance regions as the same. In order to overcome this
disadvantage PPSA is introduced. Along with the mapping
function, a circular pixel shift is introduced which adds more
energy to the high variance region. The secret key is introduced
during mapping to enhance the security. The embedding
procedure is original image and watermark image will be taken
as input, depending on the input region either PVMA or PPSA
algorithm is used and the mapping will be done. During
mapping the secret key will be introduced in order to maintain
security. Then the watermarked image is produced as the result.
Tsai et al.[7] proposed the algorithm for removing the
watermark from the watermarked image in order to get the
original image. The algorithm satisfies the three major
requirements of visible watermarking – visibility, transparency
and robustness. Watermark bits are introduced to the gray scale
image using the mapping function to get the watermarked
image. During extraction the mapping produces only the
approximated image. In order to obtain the original image,
Location image and the difference image is embedded along
with the watermarked image as the side information. The secret
key is introduced along the mapping to enhance the security.
Only the user who has the correct secret key can extract the
original image.
Lumini et al.[9] proposed a idea for selecting a best position for
inserting the watermark such that the watermark is difficult to
remove. The two conditions for selecting the best position are
the region should not be too detailed and the region should not
be excessively uniform. For selecting the position, in a host
image a local measure based on intensity variation is evaluated
then the region with the lowest mean value is selected for
inserting the watermark. The intensity variation is found using
the difference between highest and the lowest pixel.
Rajmohan et al [10] proposed a technique for selecting the
location and strength of the watermark to be inserted is based on
the content of the host image. The host image is converted from
RGB to YCbCr domain. Only the Y component is selected for
embedding. The host image is divided into 8x8 blocks and the
block DCT is performed. DCT coefficients are analyzed based
on texture, edge and luminance information. The scaling factors
are introduced based on the analysis. The DCT coefficients of
the watermark image are added with host image DCT
coefficients and the scaling factors in order to get the
watermarked image.
Mohanty et al [6] proposed a visible watermarking scheme using
DCT domain. Mathematical model has been developed for
finding the scaling and embedding factors without degrading the
quality of the image. The original image and the watermark
image are divided into 8x8. Block DCT is applied. The scaling
factors were found and DCT coefficients of the watermark are
embedded with the host image DCT coefficients. Inverse DCT is
applied in order to obtain the watermarked image.
Yeh et al [15] proposed a method which is user key dependent
removable visible watermarking scheme in compressed domain.
The original image and the watermarked image are segmented
into 8x8 blocks. Characteristics of the watermark is identified, if
the watermark image’s segmented block contains any
foreground color then it is meaningful else it is unmeaningful.
Coefficients of the segmented blocks of both original image and
the watermark image are shifted by -128 gray levels. DCT is
applied then the DCT coefficients of original image are
embedded into DCT coefficients of watermark. Then
Quantization is applied and quantized coefficients are encoded
by a Huffman encoder which results in a compressed watermark
image. When the user has the correct key the visible watermarks
can be successfully removed. The extraction process is done by
implementing the reverse operations of embedding process.
Reuben [14] proposed a reversible watermarking scheme for
compressed images. In this algorithm the residual packet is
embedded in the quantization transform coefficients which is
used to restore the watermarked region. The information is
embedded with the low frequency transform coefficients. The
embedding process overlaps the binary watermark(w) on the
host image(I) to produce watermarked image(WI). Both host
image and the watermarked image are compressed using
transformation and quantization. Then the compressed
watermark image undergoes the estimation process which
provides the information used at the decoder side during
removal of watermark. The estimated image is subtracted from
the Compressed image and results in residual packet which is
encoded and this information is used in the decoder side to
extract the original image. The encoded information is
embedded with the compressed watermarked image and entropy
coded. The decoder carries the reverse operations of encoder to
obtain the original image.
Munesh [5] proposed Visible watermarking algorithm using
Discrete Wavelet transformation. This Paper provides the full
overview of watermarking concepts which includes definition of
watermarking, general model of watermarking, types and
applications of watermarking. Then the algorithm for visible
watermarking using DWT transformation is proposed and the
coding for implementing the algorithm using MATLAB is given
in this paper. During embedding first the host image is retrieved.
The size of the watermark is obtained and the watermark is
converted into vectors. DWT is applied for embedding
watermark and the host image. Then inverse DWT is applied to
obtain the watermarked image. In the decoding process, the size
of the watermarked image and the watermark is calculated.
DWT is applied in order to display the recovered image. The
quality of the recovered image is calculated by calculating the
PSNR values.
Tsai et al [16] proposed a visible watermarking technique for
copyright protection of palette images. Visible opaque
watermark is embedded to the host image and the watermark is
considered as binary watermark. In this paper watermarking area
is always considered as the upper left corner. During embedding
process, the watermark area is divided into black watermark
embedded pixels and white watermark embedded pixels. The
occurrences of the colors of the white watermark embedded
pixels are calculated. The colors color palette is sorted in
descending order based on the calculation of the occurrences.
Euclidean distance for every color is calculated and the color
which has the maximum distance is selected. The difference
between the maximum Euclidean distance and each color is
found and arranged in ascending order. Watermark is embedded
to the watermark area where the black watermark embedded
pixels are located. User defined keys are used during embedding
for security purposes. The Extraction process implements the
reverse operations of the embedding process.
Tsung et al [17] proposed a generic lossless visible
watermarking approach where the generic property leads to
embed different types of visible watermarks which include
opaque monochrome and translucent full color ones. The
method is based on one to one compound mapping which
replaces the pixels of original image by watermark image to
produce the watermarked image. Security protection measures
were introduces for avoiding illicit recoveries. Lemmas are
proved for compound mapping. Embedding, extraction
procedures were explained.
3. CONCLUSION
In this paper a review on visible watermarking images were
discussed. To minimize the distortion many papers
included the concept of lossless recovery during extraction
since it plays a major role in hospital and military
applications. The review study clearly specifies the success
of visible image watermarking. Visible watermarking does
not require any special software for viewing the watermark.
Further work can be carried out in visible watermarking
videos. Image can be extended to video. Video is
essentially a superset of normal images. The new proposal
is to implement visible watermarking for videos with
lossless recovery.
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SCHEME”, Proceedings of the IEEE, 2007.
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9. Alessandra Lumini, Dario Maio,” Adaptive
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MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 6, NO. 1,
FEBRUARY 2004.
Prof..V.Santhi (vsanthi@vit.ac.in) is
currently working as Associate professor in VIT
University, Vellore , India. She is having more than 15
years of teaching and more than 3 years of Industry
experience. She has pursued her B.E degree in Computer
Science and Engineering from Bharathidasan University,
Trichy and M.Tech degree in Computer Science and
Engineering from Pondicherry University, Pondicherry.
She is currently doing PhD in VIT University. She is a
member of IACSIT, IEEE and CSI. Her area of research
includes Image Processing, Digital Signal Processing,
Digital Watermarking and Data Compression. She has
published many papers in international conferences and
Journals.
Saraswathi
(saraswathi2783@gmail.com) is
currently doing her M.Tech degree in
Computer Science and Engineering in VIT University,
Vellore, India. She completed her M.Sc degree in
Computer Science and Engineering from Auxilium College,
Thiruvalluvar University, Vellore, India. Her area of
interest includes Image Processing, Signal Processing,
Digital Watermarking .