• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.1499-1513
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• 2014

This paper proposes a novel blind image watermarking scheme exploiting Block Truncation Coding (BTC). Most of existing BTC-based watermarking or data hiding methods embed information in BTC compressed images by modifying the BTC encoding stage or BTC-compressed data, resulting in watermarked images with bad quality. Other than existing BTC-based watermarking schemes, our scheme does not really perform the BTC compression on images during the embedding process but uses the parity of BTC quantization data to guide the watermark embedding and extraction processes. In our scheme, we use a binary image as the original watermark. During the embedding process, the original cover image is first partitioned into non-overlapping $4{\times}4$ blocks. Then, BTC is performed on each block to obtain its BTC quantized high mean and low mean. According to the parity of high mean and the parity of low mean, two watermark bits are embedded in each block by modifying the pixel values in the block to make sure that the parity of high mean and the parity of low mean in the modified block are equal to the two watermark bits. During the extraction process, BTC is first performed on each block to obtain its high mean and low mean. By checking the parity of high mean and the parity of low mean, we can extract the two watermark bits in each block. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method is fragile to most image processing operations and various kinds of attacks while preserving the invisibility very well, thus the proposed scheme can be used for image authentication.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.883-900
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• 2017

In this paper block based blind secure gray image watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition is proposed. In devising the proposed scheme, security is given high importance along with other two requirements: robustness and imperceptibility. The use of discrete wavelet transform not only improves robustness but the selection of bands with high tolerance towards noise caused an improvement in terms of imperceptibility. The robustness further improved due to the involvement of singular vectors along with singular values in watermark embedding and extraction process. Finally, to achieve security, the selected DWT band is decomposed into smaller blocks and random blocks are chosen for modification. Furthermore, the elements of left and right singular vectors of selected blocks are chosen based on their dependence upon each other for watermark embedding. Various experiments using different images as host and watermark were conducted to examine and validate the proposed technique. Additionally, the proposed technique is tested against various attacks like compression, affine transformation, cropping, translation, X shearing, scaling, Y shearing, filtering, blurring, different kinds of noises, histogram equalization, rotation, etc. Lastly, the proposed technique is compared with state-of-the-art watermarking techniques and their comparison shows significant improvement of proposed scheme over existing techniques.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.149-156
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• 2016

We proposed a blind watermarking scheme using singular vectors based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) combined with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for copyright protection application. We replaced the 1st left and right singular vectors decomposed from cover image with the corresponding ones from watermark image to overcome the false-positive problem in current watermark systems using SVD. The proposed scheme realized the watermarking system without a false positive problem, and shows high fidelity and robustness.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.9C
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• pp.1298-1305
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• 2004

Most watermarking techniques embed watermarks in the middle frequency range for robustness and invisibility. In our proposed watermarking algorithms embed the gaussian sequence watermark into low frequency area of the wavelet transform domain because the histogram of low sub-band area is composed by similar coefficients. Also, our proposed scheme doesn't need the original image in extraction procedure The experimental results show good robustness against the Check Mark benchmarking tools.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.331-342
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an efficient watermarking algorithm using block indexing. The proposed algorithm is a novel blind watermarking scheme using the indexed watermark value based on the spread spectrum method. The watermark insertion is allocated into index value of each block after dividing original image into sub-blocks. The watermark embedded in mappinged with index values of blocks, And the mappinged blocks convert to DCT and then the PN sequence embedded to middle frequency band. Consequently the watermark is expressed by index value of sub-blocks. The watermark extracted from the correlation of between PN sequence and watermarked image. Experimental results demonstrate that the watermarked image has a good quality in terms of imperceptibility and is robust against various attacks.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.342-354
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• 2014

This paper deals with digital watermarking methods to protect ownership of image with targeting the ultra-high multi-view or free-view image service in which an arbitrary viewpoint image should be rendered at the user side. The main purpose of it is not to propose a superior method to the previous methods but to show how difficult to construct a watermarking scheme to overcome the viewpoint translation attack. Therefore we target the images with various attacks including viewpoint translation. This paper first shows how high the error rate of the extracted watermark data from viewpoint-translated image by basic schemes of the method using 2DDCT(2D discrete cosine transform) and the one using 2DDWT(2D discrete wavelet transform), which are for 2D image. Because the difficulty in watermarking for the viewpoint-translated image comes from the fact that we don't know the translated viewpoint, we propose a scheme to find the translated viewpoint, which uses the image and the corresponding depth information at the original viewpoint. This method is used to construct the two non-blind watermarking methods to be proposed. They are used to show that recovery of the viewpoint affect a great deal of the error rate of the extracted watermark. Also by comparing the performances of the proposed methods and the previous ones, we show that the proposed ones are better in invisibility and robustness, even if they are non-blind.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2014.01a
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• pp.89-92
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• 2014

This paper presents a secure and blind adaptive audio watermarking algorithm based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). The audio signal is divided into frames and each one is decomposed adaptively, by EMD, into several Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). The watermark and the synchronization codes are then embedded into the extrema of the last IMF. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good imperceptibility and robustness against signal processing attacks.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
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• 2002.05d
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• pp.867-872
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• 2002

본 논문은 디지털 컨텐츠의 저작권 보호를 위한 공간영역기반 워터마킹을 다루고 있다. 특히, 기존 연구 중 Lee[1]의 방법에서 nonblind 워터마킹의 한계를 확장시켜 원 영상과 워터마크 없이도 삽입된 워터마크를 추출할 수 있는 blind 워터마킹을 제안한다. 제안된 기법은 기존기법에서 다루어진 다양한 공격에서 동등이상의 성능을 보이고 있다.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.9C
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• pp.898-907
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new blind watermarking method that embeds a watermark on the lowest wavelet subband coefficients, while most watermarking techniques embed watermarks in the middle frequency range for robustness and fidelity. A new embedding algorithm for watermarking is proposed that embeds a bi-level watermark sequence into randomly selected wavelet coefficients on the lowest subband(LL) using a quantization in order to be robust. Experimental results prove our novel embedding strategy is invisible and good rate-distortion-robustness performance.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.233-242
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• 2009

This paper intend to show the affect of the intra-prediction on the typical digital watermarking method and the fact that the watermarking method has very low effectiveness when it is performed for the intra-frames of H.264. The target watermarking method was the one for imperceptibility and robustness and was assumed to be performed during the intra-compression process by the H.264 technique. Also this method was assumed to insert watermark data and to extract it for certification if needed. The problem is that the resulting data from the re-engineering of the watermark insertion process to extract the watermark data is different from the one before. We experimentally showed that it stems from the intra-prediction itself. That is, we showed that the resulting image data from only compression without watermarking changes if it is re-compressed by the same conditions as the first compression and it is because the intra-prediction modes as well as the coefficient values change. Also, we applied one blind and one semi-blind watermarking methods to show that the typical attacks after watermarking makes this problem much more serious and lowers the effectiveness of the watermarking method dramatically. Therefore we concluded by considering the experimental data that a typical watermarking method which has been researched so far cannot guarantee the effectiveness of intra-frame watermarking and it is highly required to developed a new kind of methodologies.