WaveMark: Digital Image Watermarking
Using Daubechies' Wavelets and Error Correcting Coding
James Ze Wang and Gio Wiederhold
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract:
As more and more digital images are distributed on-line via the
Internet and World-Wide Web, many copyright owners are concerned about
protecting the copyright of digital images. This paper describes
WaveMark, a novel wavelet-based multiresolution digital watermarking
system for color images. The algorithm in WaveMark uses discrete
wavelet transforms and error-correcting coding schemes to provide
robust watermarking of digital images. Unlike other wavelet-based
algorithms, our watermark recovery procedure does not require a match
with an uncorrupted original image. Our algorithm uses Daubechies'
advanced wavelets and extended Hamming codes to deal with problems
associated with JPEG compression and random additive noise. In
addition, the algorithm is able to sustain intentional disturbances
introduced by professional robustness testing programs such as
StirMark. The use of Daubechies' advanced wavelets makes the
watermarked images more perceptively faithful than the images
watermarked with the Haar wavelet transform. The watermark is
adaptively applied to different frequency bands and different areas of
the image, based on the smoothness of the areas, to increase
robustness within the limits of perception. The system is practical
for real-world applications, encoding or decoding images at the speed
of less than one second each on a Pentium Pro PC.
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Copyright 1998 SPIE.
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Last Modified:
Fri Oct 2 00:35:07 PDT 1998
© 1998, James Z. Wang