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Electronics
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Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking
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Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 16799

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Frederic Ros

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
PRISME laboratory, University of Orléans, Orléans, France
Interests: machine learning; clustering algorithms; prototype selection; machine vision; image watermarking; evolutionary algorithms
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Watermarking of multimedia products is essential for copyright protection, authentication, and so on. For several decades, watermarking schemes have been successfully developed, particularly for the digital and network environment, sometimes combined with cryptography schemes. There are more and more user cases where the watermarked image is printed on a physical support and read by a scanner or freehandedly with a smartphone camera. With this type of process, the watermark can be submitted to multiple strong attacks: digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital transformations, signal and geometric distortions as well as camera rotation and tilt angle distortion when using a smartphone. This makes the triple objective of robustness, capacity and imperceptibility very difficult to achieve.

Image watermarking research continues to progress using traditional signal and pattern recognition techniques, and more recently some solutions based on deep-learning technologies have emerged, with promising results.

This Special Issue is dedicated to recent developments and applications of image watermarking. It aims to address a large variety of data-hiding issues involving conceptual developments as well as dedicated applications. Proposals mixing cryptography, deep-learning approaches and, more generally, artificial intelligence techniques are welcome. The Special Issue will bring together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing and cryptography, who wish to make original research contributions.

Dr. Frederic Ros
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • image watermarking
  • steganography
  • cryptography
  • deep learning-based watermarking
  • print/scan, prim/cam, screen/cam counter attacks
  • zero watermarking
  • synchronization
  • robust watermarking
  • embedding capacity
  • data hiding and applications

Related Special Issue

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

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20 pages, 16899 KiB  
Article
Fragile Watermarking for Tamper Localization and Self-Recovery Based on AMBTC and VQ
by Chia-Chen Lin, Ting-Lin Lee, Ya-Fen Chang, Pei-Feng Shiu and Bohan Zhang
Electronics 2023, 12(2), 415; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12020415 - 13 Jan 2023
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1462
Abstract
Digital images have unique features that include being both easily transmittable over the Internet and being easy to tamper. With the advancement of digital processing techniques and an increasing number of valuable digital images being transmitted via the Internet, image authentication has been [...] Read more.
Digital images have unique features that include being both easily transmittable over the Internet and being easy to tamper. With the advancement of digital processing techniques and an increasing number of valuable digital images being transmitted via the Internet, image authentication has been made more crucial than ever. In this paper, we present an image authentication scheme with tamper localization and self-recovery using fragile watermarking. We embed the fragile watermarks consisting of the authentication code and the recovery information onto the image to verify its integrity. The proposed fragile watermarking scheme can authenticate the image without accessing the original image, localizing the modifications as well as verifying the integrity, and even reconstructing the tampered regions. We use an AMBTC compressed code as the authentication code to minimize the distortion introduced by embedding. To reduce the blocking effect that occurs in the reconstructed image, a VQ compressed code is applied instead of the average intensity as the recovery information. Several representative test images and 200 different test images were randomly selected from BOWS to examine the performance of the proposed scheme. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme can effectively resist a cutting attack and a copy-paste attack while retaining the high accuracy of tamper localization. The average TPR and average FTP rate were around 97% and 0.12%, respectively, while maintaining the image quality of the watermarked image and restoring the image at up to 48 dB and 39.28 dB, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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10 pages, 1926 KiB  
Article
A High-Capacity Coverless Information Hiding Based on the Lowest and Highest Image Fragments
by Kurnia Anggriani, Shu-Fen Chiou, Nan-I Wu and Min-Shiang Hwang
Electronics 2023, 12(2), 395; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12020395 - 12 Jan 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1680
Abstract
Coverless data hiding is resistant to steganalytical tool attacks because a stego image is not altered. On the other hand, one of its flaws is its limited hiding capacity. Recently, a coverless data-hiding method, known as the coverless information-hiding method based on the [...] Read more.
Coverless data hiding is resistant to steganalytical tool attacks because a stego image is not altered. On the other hand, one of its flaws is its limited hiding capacity. Recently, a coverless data-hiding method, known as the coverless information-hiding method based on the most significant bit of the cover image (CIHMSB), has been developed. This uses the most significant bit value in the cover image by calculating the average intensity value on the fragment and mapping it with a predefined sequence. As a result, CIHMBS is resistant to attack threats such as additive Gaussian white noise (AGWN), salt-and-pepper noise attacks, low-pass filtering attacks, and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression attacks. However, it only has a limited hiding capacity. This paper proposes a coverless information-hiding method based on the lowest and highest values of the fragment (CIHLHF) of the cover image. According to the experimental results, the hiding capacity of CIHLHF is twice that of CIHMSB. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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20 pages, 947 KiB  
Article
Watermarking Applications of Krawtchouk–Sobolev Type Orthogonal Moments
by Edmundo J. Huertas, Alberto Lastra and Anier Soria-Lorente
Electronics 2022, 11(3), 500; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11030500 - 08 Feb 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1288
Abstract
In this contribution, we consider the sequence {Hn(x;q)}n≥0 of monic polynomials orthogonal with respect to a Sobolev-type inner product involving forward difference operators For the first time in the literature, we apply [...] Read more.
In this contribution, we consider the sequence {Hn(x;q)}n≥0 of monic polynomials orthogonal with respect to a Sobolev-type inner product involving forward difference operators For the first time in the literature, we apply the non-standard properties of {Hn(x;q)}n≥0 in a watermarking problem. Several differences are found in this watermarking application for the non-standard cases (when j>0) with respect to the standard classical Krawtchouk case λ=μ=0. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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15 pages, 1066 KiB  
Article
Adaptive Video Watermarking against Scaling Attacks Based on Quantization Index Modulation
by Zhongze Lv, Ying Huang, Hu Guan, Jie Liu, Shuwu Zhang and Yang Zheng
Electronics 2021, 10(14), 1655; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10141655 - 12 Jul 2021
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2670
Abstract
Video watermarking plays a vital role in protecting the video copyright. The quantization-based methods are widely used in the existing watermarking algorithms, owing to their low computational complexity and completely blind extraction. However, most of them work poorly in resisting scaling attacks, by [...] Read more.
Video watermarking plays a vital role in protecting the video copyright. The quantization-based methods are widely used in the existing watermarking algorithms, owing to their low computational complexity and completely blind extraction. However, most of them work poorly in resisting scaling attacks, by which the quantization value may fall outside the original quantization interval. For addressing this issue, an adaptive quantization index modulation method is proposed. The property that is associated with the ratio of the DC coefficient before and after scaling the video resolution motivates us to select the DC coefficient as the quantization value and set the size of the quantization interval by the video resolution to maintain the synchronization between them before and after scaling. Moreover, a strategy taking advantage of the high decoding reliability of the QRCode is proposed to terminate the extraction in advance, and both the embedding and the extracting process are performed in the spatial domain, which all contribute to further enhance the execution efficiency. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art method in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and computational cost. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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18 pages, 495 KiB  
Article
Fast Fallback Watermark Detection Using Perceptual Hashes
by Hannes Mareen, Niels Van Kets, Peter Lambert and Glenn Van Wallendael
Electronics 2021, 10(10), 1155; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10101155 - 13 May 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2107
Abstract
Forensic watermarking is often used to enable the tracing of digital pirates that leak copyright-protected videos. However, existing watermarking methods have a limited robustness and may be vulnerable to targeted attacks. Our previous work proposed a fallback detection method that uses secondary watermarks [...] Read more.
Forensic watermarking is often used to enable the tracing of digital pirates that leak copyright-protected videos. However, existing watermarking methods have a limited robustness and may be vulnerable to targeted attacks. Our previous work proposed a fallback detection method that uses secondary watermarks rather than the primary watermarks embedded by existing methods. However, the previously proposed fallback method is slow and requires access to all watermarked videos. This paper proposes to make the fallback watermark detection method faster using perceptual hashes instead of uncompressed secondary watermark signals. These perceptual hashes can be calculated prior to detection, such that the actual detection process is sped up with a factor of approximately 26,000 to 92,000. In this way, the proposed method tackles the main criticism about practical usability of the slow fallback method. The fast detection comes at the cost of a modest decrease in robustness, although the fast fallback detection method can still outperform the existing primary watermark method. In conclusion, the proposed method enables fast and more robust detection of watermarks that were embedded by existing watermarking methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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27 pages, 34246 KiB  
Article
A Reversible Watermarking System for Medical Color Images: Balancing Capacity, Imperceptibility, and Robustness
by Xiaoyi Zhou, Yue Ma, Qingquan Zhang, Mazin Abed Mohammed and Robertas Damaševičius
Electronics 2021, 10(9), 1024; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10091024 - 25 Apr 2021
Cited by 29 | Viewed by 3236
Abstract
The authenticity and integrity of medical images in telemedicine has to be protected. Robust reversible watermarking (RRW) algorithms provide copyright protection and the original images can be recovered at the receiver’s end. However, the existing algorithms have limitations in their ability to balance [...] Read more.
The authenticity and integrity of medical images in telemedicine has to be protected. Robust reversible watermarking (RRW) algorithms provide copyright protection and the original images can be recovered at the receiver’s end. However, the existing algorithms have limitations in their ability to balance the tradeoff among robustness, imperceptibility, and embedded capacity. Some of them are even not completely reversible. Besides, most medical image watermarking algorithms are not designed for color images. To improve their performance in protecting medical color image information, we propose a novel RRW scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). First, the DWT provides a robust solution. Second, the modification of the wavelet domain coefficient guarantees the changes of integer values in the spatial domain and ensures the reversibility of the watermarking scheme. Third, the embedding scheme makes full use of the characteristics of the original image and watermarking. This reduces the modification of the original image and ensures better imperceptibility. Lastly, the selection of the Zernike moments order for geometric correction is optimized to predict attack parameters more accurately by using less information. This enhances the robustness of the proposed scheme against geometric attacks such as rotation and scaling. The proposed scheme is robust against common and geometric attacks and has a high embedding capacity without obvious distortion of the image. The paper contributes towards improving the security of medical images in remote healthcare. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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Review

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39 pages, 1350 KiB  
Review
Image Watermarking between Conventional and Learning-Based Techniques: A Literature Review
by Said Boujerfaoui, Rabia Riad, Hassan Douzi, Frédéric Ros and Rachid Harba
Electronics 2023, 12(1), 74; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12010074 - 25 Dec 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2645
Abstract
Currently, most transactions and exchanges are conducted through the Internet thanks to technological tools, running the risk of the falsification and distortion of information. This is due to the massive demand for the virtual world and its easy access to anyone. Image watermarking [...] Read more.
Currently, most transactions and exchanges are conducted through the Internet thanks to technological tools, running the risk of the falsification and distortion of information. This is due to the massive demand for the virtual world and its easy access to anyone. Image watermarking has recently emerged as one of the most important areas for protecting content and enhancing durability and resistance to these kinds of attacks. However, there is currently no integrated technology able to repel all possible kinds of attacks; the main objective of each technology remains limited to specific types of applications, meaning there are multiple opportunities to contribute to the development of this field. Recently, the image watermarking field has gained significant benefits from the sudden popularity of deep learning and its outstanding success in the field of information security. Thus, in this article, we will describe the bridge by which the watermarking field has evolved from traditional technology to intelligent technologies based on deep learning. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments and Applications of Image Watermarking)
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