• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.33-43
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• 2003

In this paper, we proposed a real-time watermarking algorithm to be combined and to work with a DWT(Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based image compressor. To reduce the amount of computation in selecting the watermarking positions, the proposed algorithm uses a pre-established look-up table for critical values, which was established statistically by computing the correlation according to the energy values of the corresponding wavelet coefficients. That is, watermark is embedded into the coefficients whose values are greater than the critical value in the look-up table which is searched on the basis of the energy values of the corresponding level-1 subband coefficients. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can operate in a real-time because the watermarking process operates in parallel with the compression procession without affecting the operation of the image compression. Also it improved the property of losing the watermark and the efficiency of image compression by watermark inserting, which results from the quantization and Huffman-Coding during the image compression. Visual recognizable patterns such as binary image were used as a watermark The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm satisfied the properties of robustness and imperceptibility that are the major conditions of watermarking.