Attacks on Copyright Marking Systems
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Information Hiding
Design and analysis of digital watermarking, information embedding, and data hiding systems
Design and analysis of digital watermarking, information embedding, and data hiding systems
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This paper briefly surveys the landscape of digital watermarking. Our goal is to understand the general principles that could lead to successful watermarking methods. Whereas cryptography is a relatively mature area of information security, serious study of digital watermarking began only recently, and much is yet unknown. Digital Piracy poses an unprecedented array of threats, ranging from intellectual property violations; to military, industrial and economic espionage; to outright despicable theft of works available in digital format. Digital watermarking while nascent is a proceeding technology that offers protection of unencrypted or decrypted digital content. The three main technical challenges faced by watermarking algorithms are fidelity, robustness and security. Current watermarking methods while offering acceptable fidelity and robustness against certain types of processing, fail to overcome data compression and noise addition challenges. Further difficulties are encountered when robust geometric transformations such as scaling, rotation and cropping of still and moving images takes place. Theoretical approaches have been developed that could lead to secure watermarking methods, but substantial gaps remain between theory and practice. The merging of computation and communication, as embodied in the myriad of digital devices and communications systems present substantial new challenges and opportunities for the processing and distribution of valuable digital creations such as audio tracks, still images, and movies for commercial, military and educational purposes. At the same time, new technology has opened the Pandora's Box of cheap, easy copying and distribution of pirated material. A standard and well-understood technical approach to reducing piracy is to use cryptography, where, only authorized users have the decryption keys. Cryptography is useful so long as the authorized user has no intention of making free copies of protected material and distributing them to friends or relatives. A complementary approach that offers protection of unencrypted material is digital watermarking to effectively limit illegal copying and distribution. We conclude the paper by presenting a digital water marking algorithm based on Quantized Index Modulated Convoluted Bezier and Hermite Splines. Using this technique, vital data can be hidden and transmitted using random phase carrier techniques. The theory behind this method is reviewed and shown to hide both pictorial and non-pictorial data with fidelity, robustness and security. The details of the procedures used for design, possible optimization, message extraction, optimization, synchronization, rotation and scaling are also discussed. Simulation and experimental evaluation of the model will be the next step in the research.