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Hybrid Scheme for Robust Digital Image Watermarking Using Dirty Paper Trellis Codes
Nayan K. Dey SPT, Reliance Communications LTD., Mumbai
nayan.dey@relianceada.com

Suman K. Mitra DAIICT, Gandhinagar, Gujarat

suman_mitra@daiict.ac.in

Ashish N. Jadhav PTI, Patni Computer Systems Ltd., Mumbai

ashish.jadhav@patni.com

Abstract
Digital images can be copied and redistributed without the loss of fidelity. This leads to issues related with copyright protection of digital images. Digital watermarking is used to effectively tackle these security related issues. In this paper a robust digital image watermarking scheme using dirty paper trellis codes is proposed. To increase the robustness and make the scheme survive more attacks the basic scheme is modified into a hybrid scheme using spread spectrum watermarking. First, a modified trellis code wherein a given message is represented by many different code words is used for embedding the watermark. Further, another watermark based on spread spectrum is also found and embedded. This hybrid scheme is more robust and survives various attacks like additive noise, valumetric scaling, histogram and de-synchronization.

1. Introduction
With the growth of multimedia services over the Internet the fact that digital information can be copied and distributed without loss of fidelity has led to development of tools for asserting copyright of the data. Digital watermarking has gained interest in the past decade for copyrighting of multimedia data. The goal of watermarking is to hide a message, either visible or invisible, in the multimedia data and then access the message using extraction process to prove the ownership of the data. Watermarking is the process that embeds and extracts the copyright information in multimedia data. The embedded and hidden information may be media number, copyright message, text, binary image or any other digital data that protects the copyright of the owner. In order to be effective, a watermark should have following characteristics depending on the application. Perceptual Transparency: The watermark should not be noticeable to the viewer nor should it degrade the quality of the original host data carrying information. Robustness: The watermark should not be removable from the watermarked data without degrading the quality of the data. Robustness also implies that if the watermarked data is distorted due to further processing the watermark should survive. An unintentional or intentional modification due to processing of the watermarked data is also viewed as an attack on the watermarked data. Universality: Same algorithm should be useful for different type of digitized media.

Digital image watermarking systems can be classified into two categories called spatial domain and transform domain watermarking systems. Embedding the watermark in spatial domain is straightforward and simple. One way of doing this is to replace the least significant bits (LSB) of the host data with the message bit [1]. Alternatively, a watermark embedding operation can be carried out in transform domain such as DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform), DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) or Wavelet Transform [2][3]. In recent years, several researchers [4] have viewed host image as a communication channel and the watermark as a signal that is transmitted through it. Thus the intentional and unintentional attacks are viewed as noise, inserted during communication. Costa [5] was interested in calculating the capacity of channels when the transmitter had information about channel noise and observed that known noise does not affect the capacity of the channel. Costas proof [5] involved a new type of special code called dirty paper code, in which each message is represented by a large set of alternative signals. The watermarks inspired by Costas work are based on the principle that, instead of having one watermark for each message, have several alternatives available and select the one with minimum interference. Due to exhaustive search at transmitter and receiver side, such a system allows only limited payloads. For achieving larger payloads there is a need to introduce a structured code that allows efficient search. Most of the structured codes used for watermarking are based on lattice codes [6]. Though these codes are efficient to implement and support large payloads, they are not robust to valumetric scaling. Miller et al [7] proposed an alternative to lattice codes called dirty paper trellis codes that are highly robust to valumetric scaling. Miller et al [8] extended the above technique for large data payloads. The new technique uses the concept of both informed coding and informed embedding and is highly robust to attacks like valumetric scaling, noise addition, and lossy compression. However, the algorithm suffers from desynchronization-based attacks where watermarked image size is changed due to standard image processing operations. In spread spectrum communication, one transmits a narrowband signal over a much larger bandwidth such that signal energy present in any single frequency is very small. Spread spectrum based watermarking technique has also been used for images [9]. It is observed in our

experimentation that it is more robust to de-synchronization based attacks. None of these two schemes by themselves are capable of resisting all the attacks that where tested in our experimentation. Moreover, it was observed that these two schemes are almost complimentary in nature as far as robustness is concerned. Hence, there is a need for a hybrid [10] approach to increase the robustness of the watermark and we propose in this paper a hybrid watermarking scheme based on the dirty paper trellis codes and spread spectrum watermarking, that is capable of surviving a wide range of attacks.

Cover Work Co Source Message (m) Message coding Watermarked Image Cw

Cm

Selection

Figure 2: An informed coding scheme A A

A B C D

2. Dirty Paper Trellis [DPT] Code Based Watermarking

Figure 1 illustrates the basic idea of informed embedding where the embedder considers the information available in the cover work (the image to be watermarked). The watermark embedding process is split into three steps: first it encodes a message m as a watermarked pattern Wm and then modifies this pattern to generate Wa and finally adds this pattern to the cover image Co, to produce watermarked work Cw. The modification of the pattern from Wm to Wa is dependent on the coding process and the actual cover work.
Cover Work Co Source Message Message coding Wm Watermarked Image Cw

Figure 3: Modified Trellis code 4 state and 4 arcs.

3. Spread Spectrum Based Watermarking

At times the main requirement of embedding the watermark into the host image is that the watermark should be invisible and robust to all possible intentional and unintentional attacks. Spread spectrum (SS) based watermarking fulfills both the requirements up to a great extent and is used for watermarking digital images. In spread spectrum communication, one transmits a narrowband signal over a much larger bandwidth such that signal energy present in any single frequency is very small. Nevertheless, watermark verification process knows the location and content of the watermark, it is possible to concentrate these many weak signals into a single output with high signal to noise ratio. To destroy, such a watermark, it requires noise of high amplitude to be added to all frequency regions. The embedding procedure involves addition of pseudo random noise to the watermark pattern and detection utilizes correlation sum after subtracting the original image from the marked image [9] [10]. Figure 4 and Figure 5 show the embedder and the decoder for such a scheme.

Modification

Wa +

Figure 1: An informed embedding scheme The informed embedding system does not take full advantage of all the information available with the cover work. Instead of creating the watermark that is independent of the cover work and then modifying it based on the cover work, an alternative approach is used called informed coding. In informed coding, each message is mapped into set of code words and out of all these code words one is chosen on the basis of information contained in the cover work. Figure 2 illustrates basic idea of informed coding. The encoding steps are as follows: Find the set of code words Cm that represents the message m. Choose one codeword C from this set Cm that is closet to the cover work. Watermark C on Co to generate Cw and transmit it. In the decoding process, we looks for the codeword C that is closest to received watermarked signal Cw, and identify the message that is represented by that codeword. The coding scheme used for this is known as dirty paper coding. A traditional code only generates a unique codeword for a given message. The trellis representation for a traditional code has each branch of the tree representing an input symbol, with the corresponding output binary symbol. For dirty paper codes the trellis [7] structure needs to be modified to generate multiple code words. The basic idea is to generate more then two arcs from every state. Figure 3 shows a modified trellis structure with 4 state and 4 arcs per

(m)

Watermark

SS watermark

Watermarked Image Host Data

PN sequence

Figure 4: Embedder for a typical SS scheme

Watermarked image

Threshold (T)

Recovered watermark

PN sequence

Host Data

Figure 5: Detector of a typical SS scheme

The binary watermark message v={0,1} or its equivalent bipolar variable b ={-1,1} is modulated by a pseudo random sequence R to generate watermark W = b R. The modulated watermark is equivalent to either R or R depending upon whether b is 1 or 1. This watermark is scaled to some embedding strength () and then embedded in the host data to generate watermarked data Cw. The selection of appropriate controls the robustness. The detector uses the concept of linear correlation to extract the watermark. The detector has knowledge about the pseudo random sequence that is used during embedding steps. Host image is subtracted from the watermarked image. Second step is demodulation, which is multiplication of the pseudo noise signal with the subtracted watermarked image. Lastly summation over a window of length equal to the size of pseudo random sequence R is calculated, yielding correlation sum over for the information bit. Now sign of this correlation sum is the information bits i.e. if sign is +ve, then watermark bit is 0 else watermark bit is 1.

from the doubly watermarked image in any order. For extracting the DPT-based watermark, the Viterbis decoding algorithm is applied to the trellis structure. It selects a message path based on the highest correlation to the doubly watermarked image. The watermark can be recovered from the bits represented by that path. The extraction of the SSbased watermark needs the help of the host image. The host image is subtracted from the received watermarked image and the resultant image is applied with the same PN sequence that is used in the embedding steps. Now the correlation sum over a window of size chip rate Rc is taken. Taking the sign of this correlation sum results in the retrieval of the SS based watermark.
W A T E R M A R K

Trellis Structure
Arc/state No of arc

Trellis pattern Correlation Multiple messages F(.

Watermark Reference vector

Host Image Block DCT

4. Hybrid Watermarking Scheme Using Dirty Paper Trellis Codes

The scheme we propose in this paper is a hybrid Dirty Paper Trellis [DPT] code Spread Spectrum [SS] method. DPT based watermarking does not survives de-synchronization attacks, but is highly robust to special types of attacks like valumetric scaling up and down. SS based watermarking survives de-synchronization based attacks. The new hybrid technique combing both the paradigms is capable of surviving a wider range of attacks. The host image is first watermarked with DPT method and the resulting image is rewatermarked using the spread spectrum based technique. During extraction, watermark is extracted individually by using both the schemes. The proposed scheme enjoys the benefits of both the methods and at least one of the watermarks survives various attacks. Figure 6 shows the block diagram of the embedder of the proposed hybrid scheme. The host image of size MN is converted into 88 block Discrete Cosine Transform [DCT] domain. From every block, 12 low frequency AC terms (excluding the DC term) are calculated and placed into vector v. This vector v is referred as the extracted vector. A modified trellis structure is defined as in Figure 3. Each arc is labeled with a randomly generated length n reference vector, where n is the pattern length and can be derived as, n = (MN12)/(88m) where, m is the payload length. We further modify the trellis to eliminate all the paths that do not encode the desired message. This is done by removing bold arcs from the steps that do not encode 0 and dotted arcs that do not encode 1. The resultant trellis structure contains the entire path that is represented by message to be watermarked. The Viterbi algorithm is applied to the extracted vector to find the path through the modified trellis that yields the highest correlation. The vector generated through this, is referred to as watermark vector w. Now informed embedding concept is used to embed the watermark vector w to the host image X. Unlike the embedding operation, watermark can be retrieved

Vector of low frequency AC terms from each block Watermarked vector Low freq. AC terms are replaced by watermarked

Block IDCT

vector
Watermarked image Spread with chip rate Spatial watermarked Doubly watermarked image

sequence

PN sequence and

embedding strength Figure 6: Embedder for proposed hybrid scheme

5. Experimental Results
The standard Lena image of size 512x512 (Figure 7a) and binary DA-IICT logo (Figure 7b) of size 64x64 was used for the purpose of experimentation.

Figure 7b: DAIICT Logo Figure 7a: Original Lena Image The embedding parameter and Rc are chosen as 5 and 64, respectively. The trellis structure is fixed to 64 states and 64 arcs per state. In order to evaluate the similarity between the original watermark and the extracted watermark, Similarity Factor (SF) is defined as follows: SF = correlation {W(i,j), w(i,j)} where, W(i,j) is the original watermark and w(i,j) is the recovered watermark. SF value 1 means that extracted

watermark is exactly similar to the original watermark. By observing the visual appearance of the extracted watermark, it is decided that a similarity of 0.6 can be considered as a successful retrieval. The proposed scheme is tested on several attacks. The extracted watermarks are shown in Figure 13. Various plots are shown in Figures 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12; to compare the two methods used in the hybrid watermarking scheme. From the graph Figure 8, it is seen that both the methods are robust to JPEG compression, though a DPT based method is able to extract exact watermark when JPEG compression is above 25%. The reason is, that DPT based scheme uses low frequency region to embed watermark where as SS method spreads the watermark into the whole image and JPEG compression affects the high frequency regions. The Remove Line attack [RML], simply removes one line from n lines. Here the n setting varies from 10 to 100 with a step of 10. So n takes values 10, 20,, 100. From the graph Figure 9, it is observed spread spectrum method is highly robust to this attack where as DPT method totally fails to recover the watermark. The reason is that DPT method does not sustain de-synchronization attacks where image size is changed due to the attack. Robustness of hybrid approach is tested for the variation of the gamma factor. The watermarked image becomes darker and darker as the gamma factor increases. The gamma factor is varied from 1 to 3.5 with step of 0.3. From the obtained graph Figure 10, it is observed that the DPT based method is more robust to this attack then the SS method. In valumetric scaling each pixel value is scaled to a predefined value, thus changing the brightness and contrast of the image. Firstly the image intensity is reduced from 1 to 0.1 with step 0.1. In second test the same is increased from 1.2 to 3 with step 0.3. From the resultant graphs in Figure 11 and Figure 12 respectively, it is clearly visible that DPT method is highly robust compared to SS method. This is because valumetric scaling multiplies all the correlation scores by the same factor and so the best path remains same.

[3] F. Duan, I. King, L. Xu, and L. Chan, Intra-block algorithm for digital watermarking, in Proc. IEEE 14th Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition, (2):15891591, 1998. [4] I. J. Cox, M. L. Miller, and A. McKellips, Watermarking as communication with side information, proc. IEEE, 87(7):1127-1141, 1999. [5] M. Costa, Writing on dirty paper, IEEE Transaction, Information Theory, (29):439-441, 1983. [6] Eggers J.J., Su J.K. and Girod B., Robustness of a blind image watermarking sheme, Proceedings of 2000 Int. Conf. on Image Processing, (3):17-20 Sept. 2000. [7] M. L. Miller, G. J. Doerr and I. J. Cox, Dirty-Paper trellis codes for watermarking, in IEEE int. Conf. on Image Proc., New York, USA, (2):129-132, Sept. 2002. [8] Lin Liu, Doerr G, I. J. Cox and M. L. Miller, An efficient algorithm for informed embedding of dirty-paper trellis codes for watermarking, in Image Proc. ICIP, 2005, (1):697-700, Sept. 2005. [9] Mercy George, Jean-Yves Chouinard and Nicolas Georganas, Digital Watermarking of Images and Video using Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum Techniques, IEEE Canadian Conf.e on Elect.&Comp. Eng., (1):116 121, 912 May 1999. [10] K. Bhandarai, S. K. Mitra and A.N. Jadhav, A hybrid approach to digital image watermarking using singular value decomposition and spread spectrum, PReMI-2005, LNCS3776, pp.447-452, 2005.

6. Conclusions
A hybrid method is proposed here for copyright protection of digital images. The scheme embeds two watermarks; first one by using the dirty paper trellis coding and the second one with the spread spectrum. The two techniques of embedding watermarks are found to complement each other as far as robustness against various attacks is concerned. The hybrid scheme being a combination of the two schemes survives all the attacks survived by each scheme independently.

7. References
[1] W. Bender, D. Gruhl, and N. Morimoto, Techniques for Data Hiding, in Proc. SPIE, San Jose, CA, (2420):40, Feb. 1995. [2] I. Hong, I. Kim, and S. Han, A blind watermarking technique using wavelet transform, in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Industrial Electronics, (3):19461950, 2001.

Figure 8: Comparison under JPEG (lossy) compression

Figure 9: Comparison under Remove Line attack

Figure 10: Comparison under Gamma correction

Figure 11: Comparison under valumetric scaling up

Median Filter JPEG

Figure 12: Comparison under valumetric scaling down

Gaussian Filter Sharpening

SF:0.88

SF: 0.67

SF:0.79

SF: 0.64

SF:0.63

SF: 0.26

SF:-0.01

SF:-0.28

Scaling (100%-110%)

Rescaling (100-150-100)

RML (10 rows)

PSNR (70%)

SF:0.03

SF: 0.98

SF:0.94

SF: 0.86

SF:0.04

SF: 0.82

SF:1.0

SF:1.0

CROP (100rows)

Histogram equalization

Intensity adjustment (0-0.7)

Intensity adjustment (0.3-1)

SF:0.05

SF: 0.76

SF:1.0 S and P

SF: 0.86 noise (0.5

SF:0.96

SF: 0.89 Blur (3x3)

SF:0.72

SF: 0.73

Gamma Correction (1.8)

Mosaic Pixelate (2)

SF:0.97

SF: 0.81

SF:0.08

SF: 0.77

SF:0.72 Dither

SF:

SF:0.98

SF: 0.03

Valumetric Scaling (0.5)

Valumetric Scaling (2)

Rotation (1 degree)

SF:1.0

SF: 0.44

SF:1.0

SF: 0.68

SF:0.15

SF: 0.01

SF:0.01

SF: 0.03

Figure 13: Extracted watermark from the hybrid DPT-SS scheme under different attacks. The captions at the top are attack names while similarity factors (SF) are given at the bottom. For each attack two watermarks inserted are extracted. The first one is in the DPT domain and the second is from the SS domain.