MATLAB Algorithms for Rapid Detection and Embedding of Palindrome and Emordnilap Electronic Watermarks in Simulated Chemical and Biological Image Data

DTIC Science & Technology

2004-12-01

digital watermarking http:// ww*.petitcolas .net/ fabien/ steganography / email: fapp2@cl.cam.ac.uk a=double(imread(’custom-a.jpg’)); %load in image ...MATLAB Algorithms for Rapid Detection and Embedding of Palindrome and Emordnilap Electronic Watermarks in Simulated Chemical and Biological Image ...approach (Ref 2-4) to watermarking involves be used to inform the viewer of data (such as photographs putting the cover image in the first 4

A joint watermarking/encryption algorithm for verifying medical image integrity and authenticity in both encrypted and spatial domains.

PubMed

Bouslimi, D; Coatrieux, G; Roux, Ch

2011-01-01

In this paper, we propose a new joint watermarking/encryption algorithm for the purpose of verifying the reliability of medical images in both encrypted and spatial domains. It combines a substitutive watermarking algorithm, the quantization index modulation (QIM), with a block cipher algorithm, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), in CBC mode of operation. The proposed solution gives access to the outcomes of the image integrity and of its origins even though the image is stored encrypted. Experimental results achieved on 8 bits encoded Ultrasound images illustrate the overall performances of the proposed scheme. By making use of the AES block cipher in CBC mode, the proposed solution is compliant with or transparent to the DICOM standard.

Robust watermarking scheme for binary images using a slice-based large-cluster algorithm with a Hamming Code

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Wen-Yuan; Liu, Chen-Chung

2006-01-01

The problems with binary watermarking schemes are that they have only a small amount of embeddable space and are not robust enough. We develop a slice-based large-cluster algorithm (SBLCA) to construct a robust watermarking scheme for binary images. In SBLCA, a small-amount cluster selection (SACS) strategy is used to search for a feasible slice in a large-cluster flappable-pixel decision (LCFPD) method, which is used to search for the best location for concealing a secret bit from a selected slice. This method has four major advantages over the others: (a) SBLCA has a simple and effective decision function to select appropriate concealment locations, (b) SBLCA utilizes a blind watermarking scheme without the original image in the watermark extracting process, (c) SBLCA uses slice-based shuffling capability to transfer the regular image into a hash state without remembering the state before shuffling, and finally, (d) SBLCA has enough embeddable space that every 64 pixels could accommodate a secret bit of the binary image. Furthermore, empirical results on test images reveal that our approach is a robust watermarking scheme for binary images.

Illustration Watermarking for Digital Images: An Investigation of Hierarchical Signal Inheritances for Nested Object-based Embedding

DTIC Science & Technology

2007-02-23

approach for signal-level watermark inheritance. 15. SUBJECT TERMS EOARD, Steganography , Image Fusion, Data Mining, Image ...in watermarking algorithms , a program interface and protocol has been de - veloped, which allows control of the embedding and retrieval processes by the...watermarks in an image . Watermarking algorithm (DLL) Watermarking editor (Delphi) - User marks all objects: ci - class information oi - object instance

MATLAB Algorithms for Rapid Detection and Embedding of Palindrome and Emordnilap Electronic Watermarks in Simulated Chemical and Biological Image Data

DTIC Science & Technology

2004-11-16

MATLAB Algorithms for Rapid Detection and Embedding of Palindrome and Emordnilap Electronic Watermarks in Simulated Chemical and Biological Image ...and Emordnilap Electronic Watermarks in Simulated Chemical and Biological Image Data 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER 5b. GRANT NUMBER 5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT...Conference on Chemical and Biological Defense Research. Held in Hunt Valley, Maryland on 15-17 November 2004., The original document contains color images

A novel image watermarking method based on singular value decomposition and digital holography

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, Zhishan

2016-10-01

According to the information optics theory, a novel watermarking method based on Fourier-transformed digital holography and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed in this paper. First of all, a watermark image is converted to a digital hologram using the Fourier transform. After that, the original image is divided into many non-overlapping blocks. All the blocks and the hologram are decomposed using SVD. The singular value components of the hologram are then embedded into the singular value components of each block using an addition principle. Finally, SVD inverse transformation is carried out on the blocks and hologram to generate the watermarked image. The watermark information embedded in each block is extracted at first when the watermark is extracted. After that, an averaging operation is carried out on the extracted information to generate the final watermark information. Finally, the algorithm is simulated. Furthermore, to test the encrypted image's resistance performance against attacks, various attack tests are carried out. The results show that the proposed algorithm has very good robustness against noise interference, image cut, compression, brightness stretching, etc. In particular, when the image is rotated by a large angle, the watermark information can still be extracted correctly.

A watermarking algorithm for polysomnography data.

PubMed

Jamasebi, R; Johnson, N L; Kaffashi, F; Redline, S; Loparo, K A

2008-01-01

A blind watermarking algorithm for polysomnography (PSG) data in European Data Format (EDF) has been developed for the identification and attribution of shared data. This is accomplished by hiding a unique identifier in the phase spectrum of each PSG epoch using an undisclosed key so that a third party cannot retrieve the watermark without knowledge of the key. A pattern discovery algorithm is developed to find the watermark pattern even though the data may have been altered. The method is evaluated using 25 PSG studies from the Sleep Heart Health Study database. The integrity of the signal data was determined using time series measures of both the original and watermarked signals, and by determining its effect on scoring sleep stages from the PSG data. The results of the analysis indicate that the proposed watermarking method for PSG data is an effective and efficient way to identify shared data without compromising its intended use.

DNA-based watermarks using the DNA-Crypt algorithm.

PubMed

Heider, Dominik; Barnekow, Angelika

2007-05-29

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the application of watermarks based on DNA sequences to identify the unauthorized use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) protected by patents. Predicted mutations in the genome can be corrected by the DNA-Crypt program leaving the encrypted information intact. Existing DNA cryptographic and steganographic algorithms use synthetic DNA sequences to store binary information however, although these sequences can be used for authentication, they may change the target DNA sequence when introduced into living organisms. The DNA-Crypt algorithm and image steganography are based on the same watermark-hiding principle, namely using the least significant base in case of DNA-Crypt and the least significant bit in case of the image steganography. It can be combined with binary encryption algorithms like AES, RSA or Blowfish. DNA-Crypt is able to correct mutations in the target DNA with several mutation correction codes such as the Hamming-code or the WDH-code. Mutations which can occur infrequently may destroy the encrypted information, however an integrated fuzzy controller decides on a set of heuristics based on three input dimensions, and recommends whether or not to use a correction code. These three input dimensions are the length of the sequence, the individual mutation rate and the stability over time, which is represented by the number of generations. In silico experiments using the Ypt7 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae shows that the DNA watermarks produced by DNA-Crypt do not alter the translation of mRNA into protein. The program is able to store watermarks in living organisms and can maintain the original information by correcting mutations itself. Pairwise or multiple sequence alignments show that DNA-Crypt produces few mismatches between the sequences similar to all steganographic algorithms.

DNA-based watermarks using the DNA-Crypt algorithm

PubMed Central

Heider, Dominik; Barnekow, Angelika

2007-01-01

Background The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the application of watermarks based on DNA sequences to identify the unauthorized use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) protected by patents. Predicted mutations in the genome can be corrected by the DNA-Crypt program leaving the encrypted information intact. Existing DNA cryptographic and steganographic algorithms use synthetic DNA sequences to store binary information however, although these sequences can be used for authentication, they may change the target DNA sequence when introduced into living organisms. Results The DNA-Crypt algorithm and image steganography are based on the same watermark-hiding principle, namely using the least significant base in case of DNA-Crypt and the least significant bit in case of the image steganography. It can be combined with binary encryption algorithms like AES, RSA or Blowfish. DNA-Crypt is able to correct mutations in the target DNA with several mutation correction codes such as the Hamming-code or the WDH-code. Mutations which can occur infrequently may destroy the encrypted information, however an integrated fuzzy controller decides on a set of heuristics based on three input dimensions, and recommends whether or not to use a correction code. These three input dimensions are the length of the sequence, the individual mutation rate and the stability over time, which is represented by the number of generations. In silico experiments using the Ypt7 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae shows that the DNA watermarks produced by DNA-Crypt do not alter the translation of mRNA into protein. Conclusion The program is able to store watermarks in living organisms and can maintain the original information by correcting mutations itself. Pairwise or multiple sequence alignments show that DNA-Crypt produces few mismatches between the sequences similar to all steganographic algorithms. PMID:17535434

Dual domain watermarking for authentication and compression of cultural heritage images.

PubMed

Zhao, Yang; Campisi, Patrizio; Kundur, Deepa

2004-03-01

This paper proposes an approach for the combined image authentication and compression of color images by making use of a digital watermarking and data hiding framework. The digital watermark is comprised of two components: a soft-authenticator watermark for authentication and tamper assessment of the given image, and a chrominance watermark employed to improve the efficiency of compression. The multipurpose watermark is designed by exploiting the orthogonality of various domains used for authentication, color decomposition and watermark insertion. The approach is implemented as a DCT-DWT dual domain algorithm and is applied for the protection and compression of cultural heritage imagery. Analysis is provided to characterize the behavior of the scheme under ideal conditions. Simulations and comparisons of the proposed approach with state-of-the-art existing work demonstrate the potential of the overall scheme.

Optical asymmetric watermarking using modified wavelet fusion and diffractive imaging

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mehra, Isha; Nishchal, Naveen K.

2015-05-01

In most of the existing image encryption algorithms the generated keys are in the form of a noise like distribution with a uniform distributed histogram. However, the noise like distribution is an apparent sign indicating the presence of the keys. If the keys are to be transferred through some communication channels, then this may lead to a security problem. This is because; the noise like features may easily catch people's attention and bring more attacks. To address this problem it is required to transfer the keys to some other meaningful images to disguise the attackers. The watermarking schemes are complementary to image encryption schemes. In most of the iterative encryption schemes, support constraints play an important role of the keys in order to decrypt the meaningful data. In this article, we have transferred the support constraints which are generated by axial translation of CCD camera using amplitude-, and phase- truncation approach, into different meaningful images. This has been done by developing modified fusion technique in wavelet transform domain. The second issue is, in case, the meaningful images are caught by the attacker then how to solve the copyright protection. To resolve this issue, watermark detection plays a crucial role. For this purpose, it is necessary to recover the original image using the retrieved watermarks/support constraints. To address this issue, four asymmetric keys have been generated corresponding to each watermarked image to retrieve the watermarks. For decryption, an iterative phase retrieval algorithm is applied to extract the plain-texts from corresponding retrieved watermarks.

Watermarking techniques for electronic delivery of remote sensing images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barni, Mauro; Bartolini, Franco; Magli, Enrico; Olmo, Gabriella

2002-09-01

Earth observation missions have recently attracted a growing interest, mainly due to the large number of possible applications capable of exploiting remotely sensed data and images. Along with the increase of market potential, the need arises for the protection of the image products. Such a need is a very crucial one, because the Internet and other public/private networks have become preferred means of data exchange. A critical issue arising when dealing with digital image distribution is copyright protection. Such a problem has been largely addressed by resorting to watermarking technology. A question that obviously arises is whether the requirements imposed by remote sensing imagery are compatible with existing watermarking techniques. On the basis of these motivations, the contribution of this work is twofold: assessment of the requirements imposed by remote sensing applications on watermark-based copyright protection, and modification of two well-established digital watermarking techniques to meet such constraints. More specifically, the concept of near-lossless watermarking is introduced and two possible algorithms matching such a requirement are presented. Experimental results are shown to measure the impact of watermark introduction on a typical remote sensing application, i.e., unsupervised image classification.

PDE based scheme for multi-modal medical image watermarking.

PubMed

Aherrahrou, N; Tairi, H

2015-11-25

This work deals with copyright protection of digital images, an issue that needs protection of intellectual property rights. It is an important issue with a large number of medical images interchanged on the Internet every day. So, it is a challenging task to ensure the integrity of received images as well as authenticity. Digital watermarking techniques have been proposed as valid solution for this problem. It is worth mentioning that the Region Of Interest (ROI)/Region Of Non Interest (RONI) selection can be seen as a significant limitation from which suffers most of ROI/RONI based watermarking schemes and that in turn affects and limit their applicability in an effective way. Generally, the ROI/RONI is defined by a radiologist or a computer-aided selection tool. And thus, this will not be efficient for an institute or health care system, where one has to process a large number of images. Therefore, developing an automatic ROI/RONI selection is a challenge task. The major aim of this work is to develop an automatic selection algorithm of embedding region based on the so called Partial Differential Equation (PDE) method. Thus avoiding ROI/RONI selection problems including: (1) computational overhead, (2) time consuming, and (3) modality dependent selection. The algorithm is evaluated in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, tamper localization and recovery using MRI, Ultrasound, CT and X-ray grey scale medical images. From experimental results that we have conducted on a database of 100 medical images of four modalities, it can be inferred that our method can achieve high imperceptibility, while showing good robustness against attacks. Furthermore, the experiment results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in detecting and recovering the various types of tampering. The highest PSNR value reached over the 100 images is 94,746 dB, while the lowest PSNR value is 60,1272 dB, which demonstrates the higher imperceptibility nature of the proposed

Image watermarking against lens flare effects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chotikawanid, Piyanart; Amornraksa, Thumrongrat

2017-02-01

Lens flare effects in various photo and camera software nowadays can partially or fully damage the watermark information within the watermarked image. We propose in this paper a spatial domain based image watermarking against lens flare effects. The watermark embedding is based on the modification of the saturation color component in HSV color space of a host image. For watermark extraction, a homomorphic filter is used to predict the original embedding component from the watermarked component, and the watermark is blindly recovered by differentiating both components. The watermarked image's quality is evaluated by wPSNR, while the extracted watermark's accuracy is evaluated by NC. The experimental results against various types of lens flare effects from both computer software and mobile application showed that our proposed method outperformed the previous methods.

Watermarking of ultrasound medical images in teleradiology using compressed watermark

PubMed Central

Badshah, Gran; Liew, Siau-Chuin; Zain, Jasni Mohamad; Ali, Mushtaq

2016-01-01

Abstract. The open accessibility of Internet-based medical images in teleradialogy face security threats due to the nonsecured communication media. This paper discusses the spatial domain watermarking of ultrasound medical images for content authentication, tamper detection, and lossless recovery. For this purpose, the image is divided into two main parts, the region of interest (ROI) and region of noninterest (RONI). The defined ROI and its hash value are combined as watermark, lossless compressed, and embedded into the RONI part of images at pixel’s least significant bits (LSBs). The watermark lossless compression and embedding at pixel’s LSBs preserve image diagnostic and perceptual qualities. Different lossless compression techniques including Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) were tested for watermark compression. The performances of these techniques were compared based on more bit reduction and compression ratio. LZW was found better than others and used in tamper detection and recovery watermarking of medical images (TDARWMI) scheme development to be used for ROI authentication, tamper detection, localization, and lossless recovery. TDARWMI performance was compared and found to be better than other watermarking schemes. PMID:26839914

Clinical evaluation of watermarked medical images.

PubMed

Zain, Jasni M; Fauzi, Abdul M; Aziz, Azian A

2006-01-01

Digital watermarking medical images provides security to the images. The purpose of this study was to see whether digitally watermarked images changed clinical diagnoses when assessed by radiologists. We embedded 256 bits watermark to various medical images in the region of non-interest (RONI) and 480K bits in both region of interest (ROI) and RONI. Our results showed that watermarking medical images did not alter clinical diagnoses. In addition, there was no difference in image quality when visually assessed by the medical radiologists. We therefore concluded that digital watermarking medical images were safe in terms of preserving image quality for clinical purposes.

A new approach to pre-processing digital image for wavelet-based watermark

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Agreste, Santa; Andaloro, Guido

2008-11-01

The growth of the Internet has increased the phenomenon of digital piracy, in multimedia objects, like software, image, video, audio and text. Therefore it is strategic to individualize and to develop methods and numerical algorithms, which are stable and have low computational cost, that will allow us to find a solution to these problems. We describe a digital watermarking algorithm for color image protection and authenticity: robust, not blind, and wavelet-based. The use of Discrete Wavelet Transform is motivated by good time-frequency features and a good match with Human Visual System directives. These two combined elements are important for building an invisible and robust watermark. Moreover our algorithm can work with any image, thanks to the step of pre-processing of the image that includes resize techniques that adapt to the size of the original image for Wavelet transform. The watermark signal is calculated in correlation with the image features and statistic properties. In the detection step we apply a re-synchronization between the original and watermarked image according to the Neyman-Pearson statistic criterion. Experimentation on a large set of different images has been shown to be resistant against geometric, filtering, and StirMark attacks with a low rate of false alarm.

A joint encryption/watermarking system for verifying the reliability of medical images.

PubMed

Bouslimi, Dalel; Coatrieux, Gouenou; Cozic, Michel; Roux, Christian

2012-09-01

In this paper, we propose a joint encryption/water-marking system for the purpose of protecting medical images. This system is based on an approach which combines a substitutive watermarking algorithm, the quantization index modulation, with an encryption algorithm: a stream cipher algorithm (e.g., the RC4) or a block cipher algorithm (e.g., the AES in cipher block chaining (CBC) mode of operation). Our objective is to give access to the outcomes of the image integrity and of its origin even though the image is stored encrypted. If watermarking and encryption are conducted jointly at the protection stage, watermark extraction and decryption can be applied independently. The security analysis of our scheme and experimental results achieved on 8-bit depth ultrasound images as well as on 16-bit encoded positron emission tomography images demonstrate the capability of our system to securely make available security attributes in both spatial and encrypted domains while minimizing image distortion. Furthermore, by making use of the AES block cipher in CBC mode, the proposed system is compliant with or transparent to the DICOM standard.

Generalized watermarking attack based on watermark estimation and perceptual remodulation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Voloshynovskiy, Sviatoslav V.; Pereira, Shelby; Herrigel, Alexander; Baumgartner, Nazanin; Pun, Thierry

2000-05-01

Digital image watermarking has become a popular technique for authentication and copyright protection. For verifying the security and robustness of watermarking algorithms, specific attacks have to be applied to test them. In contrast to the known Stirmark attack, which degrades the quality of the image while destroying the watermark, this paper presents a new approach which is based on the estimation of a watermark and the exploitation of the properties of Human Visual System (HVS). The new attack satisfies two important requirements. First, image quality after the attack as perceived by the HVS is not worse than the quality of the stego image. Secondly, the attack uses all available prior information about the watermark and cover image statistics to perform the best watermark removal or damage. The proposed attack is based on a stochastic formulation of the watermark removal problem, considering the embedded watermark as additive noise with some probability distribution. The attack scheme consists of two main stages: (1) watermark estimation and partial removal by a filtering based on a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) approach; (2) watermark alteration and hiding through addition of noise to the filtered image, taking into account the statistics of the embedded watermark and exploiting HVS characteristics. Experiments on a number of real world and computer generated images show the high efficiency of the proposed attack against known academic and commercial methods: the watermark is completely destroyed in all tested images without altering the image quality. The approach can be used against watermark embedding schemes that operate either in coordinate domain, or transform domains like Fourier, DCT or wavelet.

Quality Scalability Aware Watermarking for Visual Content.

PubMed

Bhowmik, Deepayan; Abhayaratne, Charith

2016-11-01

Scalable coding-based content adaptation poses serious challenges to traditional watermarking algorithms, which do not consider the scalable coding structure and hence cannot guarantee correct watermark extraction in media consumption chain. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of scalable blind watermarking that ensures more robust watermark extraction at various compression ratios while not effecting the visual quality of host media. The proposed algorithm generates scalable and robust watermarked image code-stream that allows the user to constrain embedding distortion for target content adaptations. The watermarked image code-stream consists of hierarchically nested joint distortion-robustness coding atoms. The code-stream is generated by proposing a new wavelet domain blind watermarking algorithm guided by a quantization based binary tree. The code-stream can be truncated at any distortion-robustness atom to generate the watermarked image with the desired distortion-robustness requirements. A blind extractor is capable of extracting watermark data from the watermarked images. The algorithm is further extended to incorporate a bit-plane discarding-based quantization model used in scalable coding-based content adaptation, e.g., JPEG2000. This improves the robustness against quality scalability of JPEG2000 compression. The simulation results verify the feasibility of the proposed concept, its applications, and its improved robustness against quality scalable content adaptation. Our proposed algorithm also outperforms existing methods showing 35% improvement. In terms of robustness to quality scalable video content adaptation using Motion JPEG2000 and wavelet-based scalable video coding, the proposed method shows major improvement for video watermarking.

Color image watermarking against fog effects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chotikawanid, Piyanart; Amornraksa, Thumrongrat

2017-07-01

Fog effects in various computer and camera software can partially or fully damage the watermark information within the watermarked image. In this paper, we propose a color image watermarking based on the modification of reflectance component against fog effects. The reflectance component is extracted from the blue color channel in the RGB color space of a host image, and then used to carry a watermark signal. The watermark extraction is blindly achieved by subtracting the estimation of the original reflectance component from the watermarked component. The performance of the proposed watermarking method in terms of wPSNR and NC is evaluated, and then compared with the previous method. The experimental results on robustness against various levels of fog effect, from both computer software and mobile application, demonstrated a higher robustness of our proposed method, compared to the previous one.

Discrete Walsh Hadamard transform based visible watermarking technique for digital color images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Santhi, V.; Thangavelu, Arunkumar

2011-10-01

As the size of the Internet is growing enormously the illegal manipulation of digital multimedia data become very easy with the advancement in technology tools. In order to protect those multimedia data from unauthorized access the digital watermarking system is used. In this paper a new Discrete walsh Hadamard Transform based visible watermarking system is proposed. As the watermark is embedded in transform domain, the system is robust to many signal processing attacks. Moreover in this proposed method the watermark is embedded in tiling manner in all the range of frequencies to make it robust to compression and cropping attack. The robustness of the algorithm is tested against noise addition, cropping, compression, Histogram equalization and resizing attacks. The experimental results show that the algorithm is robust to common signal processing attacks and the observed peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of watermarked image is varying from 20 to 30 db depends on the size of the watermark.

Spatial-frequency composite watermarking for digital image copyright protection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Su, Po-Chyi; Kuo, C.-C. Jay

2000-05-01

Digital watermarks can be classified into two categories according to the embedding and retrieval domain, i.e. spatial- and frequency-domain watermarks. Because the two watermarks have different characteristics and limitations, combination of them can have various interesting properties when applied to different applications. In this research, we examine two spatial-frequency composite watermarking schemes. In both cases, a frequency-domain watermarking technique is applied as a baseline structure in the system. The embedded frequency- domain watermark is robust against filtering and compression. A spatial-domain watermarking scheme is then built to compensate some deficiency of the frequency-domain scheme. The first composite scheme is to embed a robust watermark in images to convey copyright or author information. The frequency-domain watermark contains owner's identification number while the spatial-domain watermark is embedded for image registration to resist cropping attack. The second composite scheme is to embed fragile watermark for image authentication. The spatial-domain watermark helps in locating the tampered part of the image while the frequency-domain watermark indicates the source of the image and prevents double watermarking attack. Experimental results show that the two watermarks do not interfere with each other and different functionalities can be achieved. Watermarks in both domains are detected without resorting to the original image. Furthermore, the resulting watermarked image can still preserve high fidelity without serious visual degradation.

Reversible watermarking for authentication of DICOM images.

PubMed

Zain, J M; Baldwin, L P; Clarke, M

2004-01-01

We propose a watermarking scheme that can recover the original image from the watermarked one. The purpose is to verify the integrity and authenticity of DICOM images. We used 800x600x8 bits ultrasound (US) images in our experiment. SHA-256 of the whole image is embedded in the least significant bits of the RONI (Region of Non-Interest). If the image has not been altered, the watermark will be extracted and the original image will be recovered. SHA-256 of the recovered image will be compared with the extracted watermark for authentication.

Image-adaptive and robust digital wavelet-domain watermarking for images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhao, Yi; Zhang, Liping

2018-03-01

We propose a new frequency domain wavelet based watermarking technique. The key idea of our scheme is twofold: multi-tier solution representation of image and odd-even quantization embedding/extracting watermark. Because many complementary watermarks need to be hidden, the watermark image designed is image-adaptive. The meaningful and complementary watermark images was embedded into the original image (host image) by odd-even quantization modifying coefficients, which was selected from the detail wavelet coefficients of the original image, if their magnitudes are larger than their corresponding Just Noticeable Difference thresholds. The tests show good robustness against best-known attacks such as noise addition, image compression, median filtering, clipping as well as geometric transforms. Further research may improve the performance by refining JND thresholds.

Image segmentation-based robust feature extraction for color image watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Mianjie; Deng, Zeyu; Yuan, Xiaochen

2018-04-01

This paper proposes a local digital image watermarking method based on Robust Feature Extraction. The segmentation is achieved by Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) based on which an Image Segmentation-based Robust Feature Extraction (ISRFE) method is proposed for feature extraction. Our method can adaptively extract feature regions from the blocks segmented by SLIC. This novel method can extract the most robust feature region in every segmented image. Each feature region is decomposed into low-frequency domain and high-frequency domain by Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Watermark images are then embedded into the coefficients in the low-frequency domain. The Distortion-Compensated Dither Modulation (DC-DM) algorithm is chosen as the quantization method for embedding. The experimental results indicate that the method has good performance under various attacks. Furthermore, the proposed method can obtain a trade-off between high robustness and good image quality.

Visible digital watermarking system using perceptual models

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cheng, Qiang; Huang, Thomas S.

2001-03-01

This paper presents a visible watermarking system using perceptual models. %how and why A watermark image is overlaid translucently onto a primary image, for the purposes of immediate claim of copyright, instantaneous recognition of owner or creator, or deterrence to piracy of digital images or video. %perceptual The watermark is modulated by exploiting combined DCT-domain and DWT-domain perceptual models. % so that the watermark is visually uniform. The resulting watermarked image is visually pleasing and unobtrusive. The location, size and strength of the watermark vary randomly with the underlying image. The randomization makes the automatic removal of the watermark difficult even though the algorithm is known publicly but the key to the random sequence generator. The experiments demonstrate that the watermarked images have pleasant visual effect and strong robustness. The watermarking system can be used in copyright notification and protection.

An intermediate significant bit (ISB) watermarking technique using neural networks.

PubMed

Zeki, Akram; Abubakar, Adamu; Chiroma, Haruna

2016-01-01

Prior research studies have shown that the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is the most frequent watermarked image quality metric that is used for determining the levels of strength and weakness of watermarking algorithms. Conversely, normalised cross correlation (NCC) is the most common metric used after attacks were applied to a watermarked image to verify the strength of the algorithm used. Many researchers have used these approaches to evaluate their algorithms. These strategies have been used for a long time, however, which unfortunately limits the value of PSNR and NCC in reflecting the strength and weakness of the watermarking algorithms. This paper considers this issue to determine the threshold values of these two parameters in reflecting the amount of strength and weakness of the watermarking algorithms. We used our novel watermarking technique for embedding four watermarks in intermediate significant bits (ISB) of six image files one-by-one through replacing the image pixels with new pixels and, at the same time, keeping the new pixels very close to the original pixels. This approach gains an improved robustness based on the PSNR and NCC values that were gathered. A neural network model was built that uses the image quality metrics (PSNR and NCC) values obtained from the watermarking of six grey-scale images that use ISB as the desired output and that are trained for each watermarked image's PSNR and NCC. The neural network predicts the watermarked image's PSNR together with NCC after the attacks when a portion of the output of the same or different types of image quality metrics (PSNR and NCC) are obtained. The results indicate that the NCC metric fluctuates before the PSNR values deteriorate.

Analysis of the impact of digital watermarking on computer-aided diagnosis in medical imaging.

PubMed

Garcia-Hernandez, Jose Juan; Gomez-Flores, Wilfrido; Rubio-Loyola, Javier

2016-01-01

Medical images (MI) are relevant sources of information for detecting and diagnosing a large number of illnesses and abnormalities. Due to their importance, this study is focused on breast ultrasound (BUS), which is the main adjunct for mammography to detect common breast lesions among women worldwide. On the other hand, aiming to enhance data security, image fidelity, authenticity, and content verification in e-health environments, MI watermarking has been widely used, whose main goal is to embed patient meta-data into MI so that the resulting image keeps its original quality. In this sense, this paper deals with the comparison of two watermarking approaches, namely spread spectrum based on the discrete cosine transform (SS-DCT) and the high-capacity data-hiding (HCDH) algorithm, so that the watermarked BUS images are guaranteed to be adequate for a computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) system, whose two principal outcomes are lesion segmentation and classification. Experimental results show that HCDH algorithm is highly recommended for watermarking medical images, maintaining the image quality and without introducing distortion into the output of CADx. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Localized lossless authentication watermark (LAW)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Celik, Mehmet U.; Sharma, Gaurav; Tekalp, A. Murat; Saber, Eli S.

2003-06-01

A novel framework is proposed for lossless authentication watermarking of images which allows authentication and recovery of original images without any distortions. This overcomes a significant limitation of traditional authentication watermarks that irreversibly alter image data in the process of watermarking and authenticate the watermarked image rather than the original. In particular, authenticity is verified before full reconstruction of the original image, whose integrity is inferred from the reversibility of the watermarking procedure. This reduces computational requirements in situations when either the verification step fails or the zero-distortion reconstruction is not required. A particular instantiation of the framework is implemented using a hierarchical authentication scheme and the lossless generalized-LSB data embedding mechanism. The resulting algorithm, called localized lossless authentication watermark (LAW), can localize tampered regions of the image; has a low embedding distortion, which can be removed entirely if necessary; and supports public/private key authentication and recovery options. The effectiveness of the framework and the instantiation is demonstrated through examples.

DWT-based stereoscopic image watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chammem, A.; Mitrea, M.; Pr"teux, F.

2011-03-01

Watermarking already imposed itself as an effective and reliable solution for conventional multimedia content protection (image/video/audio/3D). By persistently (robustly) and imperceptibly (transparently) inserting some extra data into the original content, the illegitimate use of data can be detected without imposing any annoying constraint to a legal user. The present paper deals with stereoscopic image protection by means of watermarking techniques. That is, we first investigate the peculiarities of the visual stereoscopic content from the transparency and robustness point of view. Then, we advance a new watermarking scheme designed so as to reach the trade-off between transparency and robustness while ensuring a prescribed quantity of inserted information. Finally, this method is evaluated on two stereoscopic image corpora (natural image and medical data).

A novel speech watermarking algorithm by line spectrum pair modification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Qian; Yang, Senbin; Chen, Guang; Zhou, Jun

2011-10-01

To explore digital watermarking specifically suitable for the speech domain, this paper experimentally investigates the properties of line spectrum pair (LSP) parameters firstly. The results show that the differences between contiguous LSPs are robust against common signal processing operations and small modifications of LSPs are imperceptible to the human auditory system (HAS). According to these conclusions, three contiguous LSPs of a speech frame are selected to embed a watermark bit. The middle LSP is slightly altered to modify the differences of these LSPs when embedding watermark. Correspondingly, the watermark is extracted by comparing these differences. The proposed algorithm's transparency is adjustable to meet the needs of different applications. The algorithm has good robustness against additive noise, quantization, amplitude scale and MP3 compression attacks, for the bit error rate (BER) is less than 5%. In addition, the algorithm allows a relatively low capacity, which approximates to 50 bps.

Combination of watermarking and joint watermarking-decryption for reliability control and traceability of medical images.

PubMed

Bouslimi, D; Coatrieux, G; Cozic, M; Roux, Ch

2014-01-01

In this paper, we propose a novel crypto-watermarking system for the purpose of verifying the reliability of images and tracing them, i.e. identifying the person at the origin of an illegal distribution. This system couples a common watermarking method, based on Quantization Index Modulation (QIM), and a joint watermarking-decryption (JWD) approach. At the emitter side, it allows the insertion of a watermark as a proof of reliability of the image before sending it encrypted; at the reception, another watermark, a proof of traceability, is embedded during the decryption process. The scheme we propose makes interoperate such a combination of watermarking approaches taking into account risks of interferences between embedded watermarks, allowing the access to both reliability and traceability proofs. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of our system, and demonstrate it can be used to identify the physician at the origin of a disclosure even if the image has been modified.

Spread spectrum image watermarking based on perceptual quality metric.

PubMed

Zhang, Fan; Liu, Wenyu; Lin, Weisi; Ngan, King Ngi

2011-11-01

Efficient image watermarking calls for full exploitation of the perceptual distortion constraint. Second-order statistics of visual stimuli are regarded as critical features for perception. This paper proposes a second-order statistics (SOS)-based image quality metric, which considers the texture masking effect and the contrast sensitivity in Karhunen-Loève transform domain. Compared with the state-of-the-art metrics, the quality prediction by SOS better correlates with several subjectively rated image databases, in which the images are impaired by the typical coding and watermarking artifacts. With the explicit metric definition, spread spectrum watermarking is posed as an optimization problem: we search for a watermark to minimize the distortion of the watermarked image and to maximize the correlation between the watermark pattern and the spread spectrum carrier. The simple metric guarantees the optimal watermark a closed-form solution and a fast implementation. The experiments show that the proposed watermarking scheme can take full advantage of the distortion constraint and improve the robustness in return.

Quantum Watermarking Scheme Based on INEQR

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhou, Ri-Gui; Zhou, Yang; Zhu, Changming; Wei, Lai; Zhang, Xiafen; Ian, Hou

2018-04-01

Quantum watermarking technology protects copyright by embedding invisible quantum signal in quantum multimedia data. In this paper, a watermarking scheme based on INEQR was presented. Firstly, the watermark image is extended to achieve the requirement of embedding carrier image. Secondly, the swap and XOR operation is used on the processed pixels. Since there is only one bit per pixel, XOR operation can achieve the effect of simple encryption. Thirdly, both the watermark image extraction and embedding operations are described, where the key image, swap operation and LSB algorithm are used. When the embedding is made, the binary image key is changed. It means that the watermark has been embedded. Of course, if the watermark image is extracted, the key's state need detected. When key's state is |1>, this extraction operation is carried out. Finally, for validation of the proposed scheme, both the Signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the security of the scheme are analyzed.

Watermarking-based protection of remote sensing images: requirements and possible solutions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barni, Mauro; Bartolini, Franco; Cappellini, Vito; Magli, Enrico; Olmo, Gabriella

2001-12-01

Earth observation missions have recently attracted ag rowing interest form the scientific and industrial communities, mainly due to the large number of possible applications capable to exploit remotely sensed data and images. Along with the increase of market potential, the need arises for the protection of the image products from non-authorized use. Such a need is a very crucial one even because the Internet and other public/private networks have become preferred means of data exchange. A crucial issue arising when dealing with digital image distribution is copyright protection. Such a problem has been largely addressed by resorting to watermarking technology. A question that obviously arises is whether the requirements imposed by remote sensing imagery are compatible with existing watermarking techniques. On the basis of these motivations, the contribution of this work is twofold: i) assessment of the requirements imposed by the characteristics of remotely sensed images on watermark-based copyright protection ii) analysis of the state-of-the-art, and performance evaluation of existing algorithms in terms of the requirements at the previous point.

A RONI Based Visible Watermarking Approach for Medical Image Authentication.

PubMed

Thanki, Rohit; Borra, Surekha; Dwivedi, Vedvyas; Borisagar, Komal

2017-08-09

Nowadays medical data in terms of image files are often exchanged between different hospitals for use in telemedicine and diagnosis. Visible watermarking being extensively used for Intellectual Property identification of such medical images, leads to serious issues if failed to identify proper regions for watermark insertion. In this paper, the Region of Non-Interest (RONI) based visible watermarking for medical image authentication is proposed. In this technique, to RONI of the cover medical image is first identified using Human Visual System (HVS) model. Later, watermark logo is visibly inserted into RONI of the cover medical image to get watermarked medical image. Finally, the watermarked medical image is compared with the original medical image for measurement of imperceptibility and authenticity of proposed scheme. The experimental results showed that this proposed scheme reduces the computational complexity and improves the PSNR when compared to many existing schemes.

Imperceptible reversible watermarking of radiographic images based on quantum noise masking.

PubMed

Pan, Wei; Bouslimi, Dalel; Karasad, Mohamed; Cozic, Michel; Coatrieux, Gouenou

2018-07-01

Advances in information and communication technologies boost the sharing and remote access to medical images. Along with this evolution, needs in terms of data security are also increased. Watermarking can contribute to better protect images by dissimulating into their pixels some security attributes (e.g., digital signature, user identifier). But, to take full advantage of this technology in healthcare, one key problem to address is to ensure that the image distortion induced by the watermarking process does not endanger the image diagnosis value. To overcome this issue, reversible watermarking is one solution. It allows watermark removal with the exact recovery of the image. Unfortunately, reversibility does not mean that imperceptibility constraints are relaxed. Indeed, once the watermark removed, the image is unprotected. It is thus important to ensure the invisibility of reversible watermark in order to ensure a permanent image protection. We propose a new fragile reversible watermarking scheme for digital radiographic images, the main originality of which stands in masking a reversible watermark into the image quantum noise (the dominant noise in radiographic images). More clearly, in order to ensure the watermark imperceptibility, our scheme differentiates the image black background, where message embedding is conducted into pixel gray values with the well-known histogram shifting (HS) modulation, from the anatomical object, where HS is applied to wavelet detail coefficients, masking the watermark with the image quantum noise. In order to maintain the watermark embedder and reader synchronized in terms of image partitioning and insertion domain, our scheme makes use of different classification processes that are invariant to message embedding. We provide the theoretical performance limits of our scheme into the image quantum noise in terms of image distortion and message size (i.e. capacity). Experiments conducted on more than 800 12 bits radiographic images

Combining Digital Watermarking and Fingerprinting Techniques to Identify Copyrights for Color Images

PubMed Central

Hsieh, Shang-Lin; Chen, Chun-Che; Shen, Wen-Shan

2014-01-01

This paper presents a copyright identification scheme for color images that takes advantage of the complementary nature of watermarking and fingerprinting. It utilizes an authentication logo and the extracted features of the host image to generate a fingerprint, which is then stored in a database and also embedded in the host image to produce a watermarked image. When a dispute over the copyright of a suspect image occurs, the image is first processed by watermarking. If the watermark can be retrieved from the suspect image, the copyright can then be confirmed; otherwise, the watermark then serves as the fingerprint and is processed by fingerprinting. If a match in the fingerprint database is found, then the suspect image will be considered a duplicated one. Because the proposed scheme utilizes both watermarking and fingerprinting, it is more robust than those that only adopt watermarking, and it can also obtain the preliminary result more quickly than those that only utilize fingerprinting. The experimental results show that when the watermarked image suffers slight attacks, watermarking alone is enough to identify the copyright. The results also show that when the watermarked image suffers heavy attacks that render watermarking incompetent, fingerprinting can successfully identify the copyright, hence demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. PMID:25114966

Robust watermark technique using masking and Hermite transform.

PubMed

Coronel, Sandra L Gomez; Ramírez, Boris Escalante; Mosqueda, Marco A Acevedo

2016-01-01

The following paper evaluates a watermark algorithm designed for digital images by using a perceptive mask and a normalization process, thus preventing human eye detection, as well as ensuring its robustness against common processing and geometric attacks. The Hermite transform is employed because it allows a perfect reconstruction of the image, while incorporating human visual system properties; moreover, it is based on the Gaussian functions derivates. The applied watermark represents information of the digital image proprietor. The extraction process is blind, because it does not require the original image. The following techniques were utilized in the evaluation of the algorithm: peak signal-to-noise ratio, the structural similarity index average, the normalized crossed correlation, and bit error rate. Several watermark extraction tests were performed, with against geometric and common processing attacks. It allowed us to identify how many bits in the watermark can be modified for its adequate extraction.

The comparison between SVD-DCT and SVD-DWT digital image watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wira Handito, Kurniawan; Fauzi, Zulfikar; Aminy Ma’ruf, Firda; Widyaningrum, Tanti; Muslim Lhaksmana, Kemas

2018-03-01

With internet, anyone can publish their creation into digital data simply, inexpensively, and absolutely easy to be accessed by everyone. However, the problem appears when anyone else claims that the creation is their property or modifies some part of that creation. It causes necessary protection of copyrights; one of the examples is with watermarking method in digital image. The application of watermarking technique on digital data, especially on image, enables total invisibility if inserted in carrier image. Carrier image will not undergo any decrease of quality and also the inserted image will not be affected by attack. In this paper, watermarking will be implemented on digital image using Singular Value Decomposition based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) by expectation in good performance of watermarking result. In this case, trade-off happen between invisibility and robustness of image watermarking. In embedding process, image watermarking has a good quality for scaling factor < 0.1. The quality of image watermarking in decomposition level 3 is better than level 2 and level 1. Embedding watermark in low-frequency is robust to Gaussian blur attack, rescale, and JPEG compression, but in high-frequency is robust to Gaussian noise.

Digital watermarking for color images in hue-saturation-value color space

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tachaphetpiboon, Suwat; Thongkor, Kharittha; Amornraksa, Thumrongrat; Delp, Edward J.

2014-05-01

This paper proposes a new watermarking scheme for color images, in which all pixels of the image are used for embedding watermark bits in order to achieve the highest amount of embedding. For watermark embedding, the S component in the hue-saturation-value (HSV) color space is used to carry the watermark bits, while the V component is used in accordance with a human visual system model to determine the proper watermark strength. In the proposed scheme, the number of watermark bits equals the number of pixels in the host image. Watermark extraction is accomplished blindly based on the use of a 3×3 spatial domain Wiener filter. The efficiency of our proposed image watermarking scheme depends mainly on the accuracy of the estimate of the original S component. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme, under no attacks and against various types of attacks, was superior to the previous existing watermarking schemes.

Video multiple watermarking technique based on image interlacing using DWT.

PubMed

Ibrahim, Mohamed M; Abdel Kader, Neamat S; Zorkany, M

2014-01-01

Digital watermarking is one of the important techniques to secure digital media files in the domains of data authentication and copyright protection. In the nonblind watermarking systems, the need of the original host file in the watermark recovery operation makes an overhead over the system resources, doubles memory capacity, and doubles communications bandwidth. In this paper, a robust video multiple watermarking technique is proposed to solve this problem. This technique is based on image interlacing. In this technique, three-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used as a watermark embedding/extracting domain, Arnold transform is used as a watermark encryption/decryption method, and different types of media (gray image, color image, and video) are used as watermarks. The robustness of this technique is tested by applying different types of attacks such as: geometric, noising, format-compression, and image-processing attacks. The simulation results show the effectiveness and good performance of the proposed technique in saving system resources, memory capacity, and communications bandwidth.

Watermarking scheme for authentication of compressed image

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hsieh, Tsung-Han; Li, Chang-Tsun; Wang, Shuo

2003-11-01

As images are commonly transmitted or stored in compressed form such as JPEG, to extend the applicability of our previous work, a new scheme for embedding watermark in compressed domain without resorting to cryptography is proposed. In this work, a target image is first DCT transformed and quantised. Then, all the coefficients are implicitly watermarked in order to minimize the risk of being attacked on the unwatermarked coefficients. The watermarking is done through registering/blending the zero-valued coefficients with a binary sequence to create the watermark and involving the unembedded coefficients during the process of embedding the selected coefficients. The second-order neighbors and the block itself are considered in the process of the watermark embedding in order to thwart different attacks such as cover-up, vector quantisation, and transplantation. The experiments demonstrate the capability of the proposed scheme in thwarting local tampering, geometric transformation such as cropping, and common signal operations such as lowpass filtering.

Image authentication by means of fragile CGH watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schirripa Spagnolo, Giuseppe; Simonetti, Carla; Cozzella, Lorenzo

2005-09-01

In this paper we propose a fragile marking system based on Computer Generated Hologram coding techniques, which is able to detect malicious tampering while tolerating some incidental distortions. A fragile watermark is a mark that is readily altered or destroyed when the host image is modified through a linear or nonlinear transformation. A fragile watermark monitors the integrity of the content of the image but not its numerical representation. Therefore the watermark is designed so that the integrity is proven if the content of the image has not been tampered. Since digital images can be altered or manipulated with ease, the ability to detect changes to digital images is very important for many applications such as news reporting, medical archiving, or legal usages. The proposed technique could be applied to Color Images as well as to Gray Scale ones. Using Computer Generated Hologram watermarking, the embedded mark could be easily recovered by means of a Fourier Transform. Due to this fact host image can be tampered and watermarked with the same holographic pattern. To avoid this possibility we have introduced an encryption method using a asymmetric Cryptography. The proposed schema is based on the knowledge of original mark from the Authentication

Medical Image Authentication Using DPT Watermarking: A Preliminary Attempt

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wong, M. L. Dennis; Goh, Antionette W.-T.; Chua, Hong Siang

Secure authentication of digital medical image content provides great value to the e-Health community and medical insurance industries. Fragile Watermarking has been proposed to provide the mechanism to authenticate digital medical image securely. Transform Domain based Watermarking are typically slower than spatial domain watermarking owing to the overhead in calculation of coefficients. In this paper, we propose a new Discrete Pascal Transform based watermarking technique. Preliminary experiment result shows authentication capability. Possible improvements on the proposed scheme are also presented before conclusions.

Oriented modulation for watermarking in direct binary search halftone images.

PubMed

Guo, Jing-Ming; Su, Chang-Cheng; Liu, Yun-Fu; Lee, Hua; Lee, Jiann-Der

2012-09-01

In this paper, a halftoning-based watermarking method is presented. This method enables high pixel-depth watermark embedding, while maintaining high image quality. This technique is capable of embedding watermarks with pixel depths up to 3 bits without causing prominent degradation to the image quality. To achieve high image quality, the parallel oriented high-efficient direct binary search (DBS) halftoning is selected to be integrated with the proposed orientation modulation (OM) method. The OM method utilizes different halftone texture orientations to carry different watermark data. In the decoder, the least-mean-square-trained filters are applied for feature extraction from watermarked images in the frequency domain, and the naïve Bayes classifier is used to analyze the extracted features and ultimately to decode the watermark data. Experimental results show that the DBS-based OM encoding method maintains a high degree of image quality and realizes the processing efficiency and robustness to be adapted in printing applications.

Text image authenticating algorithm based on MD5-hash function and Henon map

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wei, Jinqiao; Wang, Ying; Ma, Xiaoxue

2017-07-01

In order to cater to the evidentiary requirements of the text image, this paper proposes a fragile watermarking algorithm based on Hash function and Henon map. The algorithm is to divide a text image into parts, get flippable pixels and nonflippable pixels of every lump according to PSD, generate watermark of non-flippable pixels with MD5-Hash, encrypt watermark with Henon map and select embedded blocks. The simulation results show that the algorithm with a good ability in tampering localization can be used to authenticate and forensics the authenticity and integrity of text images

Quantum color image watermarking based on Arnold transformation and LSB steganography

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhou, Ri-Gui; Hu, Wenwen; Fan, Ping; Luo, Gaofeng

In this paper, a quantum color image watermarking scheme is proposed through twice-scrambling of Arnold transformations and steganography of least significant bit (LSB). Both carrier image and watermark images are represented by the novel quantum representation of color digital images model (NCQI). The image sizes for carrier and watermark are assumed to be 2n×2n and 2n‑1×2n‑1, respectively. At first, the watermark is scrambled into a disordered form through image preprocessing technique of exchanging the image pixel position and altering the color information based on Arnold transforms, simultaneously. Then, the scrambled watermark with 2n‑1×2n‑1 image size and 24-qubit grayscale is further expanded to an image with size 2n×2n and 6-qubit grayscale using the nearest-neighbor interpolation method. Finally, the scrambled and expanded watermark is embedded into the carrier by steganography of LSB scheme, and a key image with 2n×2n size and 3-qubit information is generated at the meantime, which only can use the key image to retrieve the original watermark. The extraction of watermark is the reverse process of embedding, which is achieved by applying a sequence of operations in the reverse order. Simulation-based experimental results involving different carrier and watermark images (i.e. conventional or non-quantum) are simulated based on the classical computer’s MATLAB 2014b software, which illustrates that the present method has a good performance in terms of three items: visual quality, robustness and steganography capacity.

Impact of MPEG-4 3D mesh coding on watermarking algorithms for polygonal 3D meshes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Funk, Wolfgang

2004-06-01

The MPEG-4 multimedia standard addresses the scene-based composition of audiovisual objects. Natural and synthetic multimedia content can be mixed and transmitted over narrow and broadband communication channels. Synthetic natural hybrid coding (SNHC) within MPEG-4 provides tools for 3D mesh coding (3DMC). We investigate the robustness of two different 3D watermarking algorithms for polygonal meshes with respect to 3DMC. The first algorithm is a blind detection scheme designed for labelling applications that require high bandwidth and low robustness. The second algorithm is a robust non-blind one-bit watermarking scheme intended for copyright protection applications. Both algorithms have been proposed by Benedens. We expect 3DMC to have an impact on the watermarked 3D meshes, as the algorithms used for our simulations work on vertex coordinates to encode the watermark. We use the 3DMC implementation provided with the MPEG-4 reference software and the Princeton Shape Benchmark model database for our simulations. The watermarked models are sent through the 3DMC encoder and decoder, and the watermark decoding process is performed. For each algorithm under consideration we examine the detection properties as a function of the quantization of the vertex coordinates.

Digital Watermarking: From Concepts to Real-Time Video Applications

DTIC Science & Technology

1999-01-01

includes still- image , video, audio, and geometry data among others-the fundamental con- cept of steganography can be transferred from the field of...size of the message, which should be as small as possible. Some commercially available algorithms for image watermarking forego the secure-watermarking... image compres- sion.’ The image’s luminance component is divided into 8 x 8 pixel blocks. The algorithm selects a sequence of blocks and applies the

Plenoptic image watermarking to preserve copyright

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ansari, A.; Dorado, A.; Saavedra, G.; Martinez Corral, M.

2017-05-01

Common camera loses a huge amount of information obtainable from scene as it does not record the value of individual rays passing a point and it merely keeps the summation of intensities of all the rays passing a point. Plenoptic images can be exploited to provide a 3D representation of the scene and watermarking such images can be helpful to protect the ownership of these images. In this paper we propose a method for watermarking the plenoptic images to achieve this aim. The performance of the proposed method is validated by experimental results and a compromise is held between imperceptibility and robustness.

A Robust Image Watermarking in the Joint Time-Frequency Domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Öztürk, Mahmut; Akan, Aydın; Çekiç, Yalçın

2010-12-01

With the rapid development of computers and internet applications, copyright protection of multimedia data has become an important problem. Watermarking techniques are proposed as a solution to copyright protection of digital media files. In this paper, a new, robust, and high-capacity watermarking method that is based on spatiofrequency (SF) representation is presented. We use the discrete evolutionary transform (DET) calculated by the Gabor expansion to represent an image in the joint SF domain. The watermark is embedded onto selected coefficients in the joint SF domain. Hence, by combining the advantages of spatial and spectral domain watermarking methods, a robust, invisible, secure, and high-capacity watermarking method is presented. A correlation-based detector is also proposed to detect and extract any possible watermarks on an image. The proposed watermarking method was tested on some commonly used test images under different signal processing attacks like additive noise, Wiener and Median filtering, JPEG compression, rotation, and cropping. Simulation results show that our method is robust against all of the attacks.

A new watermarking approach based on combination of reversible watermarking and CDMA in spatial and DWT domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bekkouche, S.; Chouarfia, A.

2011-06-01

Image watermarking can be defined as a technique that allows insertion of imperceptible and indelible digital data into an image. In addition to its initial application which is the copyright, watermarking can be used in other fields, particularly in the medical field in order to contribute to secure images shared on the network for telemedicine applications. In this report we study some watermarking methods and the comparison result of their combination, the first one is based on the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) in DWT and spatial domain and its aim is to verify the image authenticity whereas the second one is the reversible watermarking (the least significant bits LSB and cryptography tools) and the reversible contrast mapping RCM its objective is to check the integrity of the image and to keep the Confidentiality of the patient data. A new scheme of watermarking is the combination of the reversible watermarking method based on LSB and cryptography tools and the method of CDMA in spatial and DWT domain to verify the three security properties Integrity, Authenticity and confidentiality of medical data and patient information .In the end ,we made a comparison between these methods within the parameters of quality of medical images. Initially, an in-depth study on the characteristics of medical images would contribute to improve these methods to mitigate their limits and to optimize the results. Tests were done on IRM kind of medical images and the quality measurements have been done on the watermarked image to verify that this technique does not lead to a wrong diagnostic. The robustness of the watermarked images against attacks has been verified on the parameters of PSNR, SNR, MSE and MAE which the experimental result demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is good and robust in DWT than in spatial domain.

The video watermarking container: efficient real-time transaction watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wolf, Patrick; Hauer, Enrico; Steinebach, Martin

2008-02-01

When transaction watermarking is used to secure sales in online shops by embedding transaction specific watermarks, the major challenge is embedding efficiency: Maximum speed by minimal workload. This is true for all types of media. Video transaction watermarking presents a double challenge. Video files not only are larger than for example music files of the same playback time. In addition, video watermarking algorithms have a higher complexity than algorithms for other types of media. Therefore online shops that want to protect their videos by transaction watermarking are faced with the problem that their servers need to work harder and longer for every sold medium in comparison to audio sales. In the past, many algorithms responded to this challenge by reducing their complexity. But this usually results in a loss of either robustness or transparency. This paper presents a different approach. The container technology separates watermark embedding into two stages: A preparation stage and the finalization stage. In the preparation stage, the video is divided into embedding segments. For each segment one copy marked with "0" and anther one marked with "1" is created. This stage is computationally expensive but only needs to be done once. In the finalization stage, the watermarked video is assembled from the embedding segments according to the watermark message. This stage is very fast and involves no complex computations. It thus allows efficient creation of individually watermarked video files.

Global motion compensated visual attention-based video watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Oakes, Matthew; Bhowmik, Deepayan; Abhayaratne, Charith

2016-11-01

Imperceptibility and robustness are two key but complementary requirements of any watermarking algorithm. Low-strength watermarking yields high imperceptibility but exhibits poor robustness. High-strength watermarking schemes achieve good robustness but often suffer from embedding distortions resulting in poor visual quality in host media. This paper proposes a unique video watermarking algorithm that offers a fine balance between imperceptibility and robustness using motion compensated wavelet-based visual attention model (VAM). The proposed VAM includes spatial cues for visual saliency as well as temporal cues. The spatial modeling uses the spatial wavelet coefficients while the temporal modeling accounts for both local and global motion to arrive at the spatiotemporal VAM for video. The model is then used to develop a video watermarking algorithm, where a two-level watermarking weighting parameter map is generated from the VAM saliency maps using the saliency model and data are embedded into the host image according to the visual attentiveness of each region. By avoiding higher strength watermarking in the visually attentive region, the resulting watermarked video achieves high perceived visual quality while preserving high robustness. The proposed VAM outperforms the state-of-the-art video visual attention methods in joint saliency detection and low computational complexity performance. For the same embedding distortion, the proposed visual attention-based watermarking achieves up to 39% (nonblind) and 22% (blind) improvement in robustness against H.264/AVC compression, compared to existing watermarking methodology that does not use the VAM. The proposed visual attention-based video watermarking results in visual quality similar to that of low-strength watermarking and a robustness similar to those of high-strength watermarking.

Optical colour image watermarking based on phase-truncated linear canonical transform and image decomposition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Su, Yonggang; Tang, Chen; Li, Biyuan; Lei, Zhenkun

2018-05-01

This paper presents a novel optical colour image watermarking scheme based on phase-truncated linear canonical transform (PT-LCT) and image decomposition (ID). In this proposed scheme, a PT-LCT-based asymmetric cryptography is designed to encode the colour watermark into a noise-like pattern, and an ID-based multilevel embedding method is constructed to embed the encoded colour watermark into a colour host image. The PT-LCT-based asymmetric cryptography, which can be optically implemented by double random phase encoding with a quadratic phase system, can provide a higher security to resist various common cryptographic attacks. And the ID-based multilevel embedding method, which can be digitally implemented by a computer, can make the information of the colour watermark disperse better in the colour host image. The proposed colour image watermarking scheme possesses high security and can achieve a higher robustness while preserving the watermark’s invisibility. The good performance of the proposed scheme has been demonstrated by extensive experiments and comparison with other relevant schemes.

A study for watermark methods appropriate to medical images.

PubMed

Cho, Y; Ahn, B; Kim, J S; Kim, I Y; Kim, S I

2001-06-01

The network system, including the picture archiving and communication system (PACS), is essential in hospital and medical imaging fields these days. Many medical images are accessed and processed on the web, as well as in PACS. Therefore, any possible accidents caused by the illegal modification of medical images must be prevented. Digital image watermark techniques have been proposed as a method to protect against illegal copying or modification of copyrighted material. Invisible signatures made by a digital image watermarking technique can be a solution to these problems. However, medical images have some different characteristics from normal digital images in that one must not corrupt the information contained in the original medical images. In this study, we suggest modified watermark methods appropriate for medical image processing and communication system that prevent clinically important data contained in original images from being corrupted.

Just Noticeable Distortion Model and Its Application in Color Image Watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Kuo-Cheng

In this paper, a perceptually adaptive watermarking scheme for color images is proposed in order to achieve robustness and transparency. A new just noticeable distortion (JND) estimator for color images is first designed in the wavelet domain. The key issue of the JND model is to effectively integrate visual masking effects. The estimator is an extension to the perceptual model that is used in image coding for grayscale images. Except for the visual masking effects given coefficient by coefficient by taking into account the luminance content and the texture of grayscale images, the crossed masking effect given by the interaction between luminance and chrominance components and the effect given by the variance within the local region of the target coefficient are investigated such that the visibility threshold for the human visual system (HVS) can be evaluated. In a locally adaptive fashion based on the wavelet decomposition, the estimator applies to all subbands of luminance and chrominance components of color images and is used to measure the visibility of wavelet quantization errors. The subband JND profiles are then incorporated into the proposed color image watermarking scheme. Performance in terms of robustness and transparency of the watermarking scheme is obtained by means of the proposed approach to embed the maximum strength watermark while maintaining the perceptually lossless quality of the watermarked color image. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme with inserting watermarks into luminance and chrominance components is more robust than the existing scheme while retaining the watermark transparency.

An improved quantum watermarking scheme using small-scale quantum circuits and color scrambling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Panchi; Zhao, Ya; Xiao, Hong; Cao, Maojun

2017-05-01

In order to solve the problem of embedding the watermark into the quantum color image, in this paper, an improved scheme of using small-scale quantum circuits and color scrambling is proposed. Both color carrier image and color watermark image are represented using novel enhanced quantum representation. The image sizes for carrier and watermark are assumed to be 2^{n+1}× 2^{n+2} and 2n× 2n, respectively. At first, the color of pixels in watermark image is scrambled using the controlled rotation gates, and then, the scrambled watermark with 2^n× 2^n image size and 24-qubit gray scale is expanded to an image with 2^{n+1}× 2^{n+2} image size and 3-qubit gray scale. Finally, the expanded watermark image is embedded into the carrier image by the controlled-NOT gates. The extraction of watermark is the reverse process of embedding it into carrier image, which is achieved by applying operations in the reverse order. Simulation-based experimental results show that the proposed scheme is superior to other similar algorithms in terms of three items, visual quality, scrambling effect of watermark image, and noise resistibility.

An Invisible Text Watermarking Algorithm using Image Watermark

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jalil, Zunera; Mirza, Anwar M.

Copyright protection of digital contents is very necessary in today's digital world with efficient communication mediums as internet. Text is the dominant part of the internet contents and there are very limited techniques available for text protection. This paper presents a novel algorithm for protection of plain text, which embeds the logo image of the copyright owner in the text and this logo can be extracted from the text later to prove ownership. The algorithm is robust against content-preserving modifications and at the same time, is capable of detecting malicious tampering. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm against tampering attacks by calculating normalized hamming distances. The results are also compared with a recent work in this domain

Encryption and watermark-treated medical image against hacking disease-An immune convention in spatial and frequency domains.

PubMed

Lakshmi, C; Thenmozhi, K; Rayappan, John Bosco Balaguru; Amirtharajan, Rengarajan

2018-06-01

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is one among the significant formats used worldwide for the representation of medical images. Undoubtedly, medical-image security plays a crucial role in telemedicine applications. Merging encryption and watermarking in medical-image protection paves the way for enhancing the authentication and safer transmission over open channels. In this context, the present work on DICOM image encryption has employed a fuzzy chaotic map for encryption and the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for watermarking. The proposed approach overcomes the limitation of the Arnold transform-one of the most utilised confusion mechanisms in image ciphering. Various metrics have substantiated the effectiveness of the proposed medical-image encryption algorithm. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Robust digital image watermarking using distortion-compensated dither modulation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Mianjie; Yuan, Xiaochen

2018-04-01

In this paper, we propose a robust feature extraction based digital image watermarking method using Distortion- Compensated Dither Modulation (DC-DM). Our proposed local watermarking method provides stronger robustness and better flexibility than traditional global watermarking methods. We improve robustness by introducing feature extraction and DC-DM method. To extract the robust feature points, we propose a DAISY-based Robust Feature Extraction (DRFE) method by employing the DAISY descriptor and applying the entropy calculation based filtering. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves satisfactory robustness under the premise of ensuring watermark imperceptibility quality compared to other existing methods.

Watermarked cardiac CT image segmentation using deformable models and the Hermite transform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gomez-Coronel, Sandra L.; Moya-Albor, Ernesto; Escalante-Ramírez, Boris; Brieva, Jorge

2015-01-01

Medical image watermarking is an open area for research and is a solution for the protection of copyright and intellectual property. One of the main challenges of this problem is that the marked images should not differ perceptually from the original images allowing a correct diagnosis and authentication. Furthermore, we also aim at obtaining watermarked images with very little numerical distortion so that computer vision tasks such as segmentation of important anatomical structures do not be impaired or affected. We propose a preliminary watermarking application in cardiac CT images based on a perceptive approach that includes a brightness model to generate a perceptive mask and identify the image regions where the watermark detection becomes a difficult task for the human eye. We propose a normalization scheme of the image in order to improve robustness against geometric attacks. We follow a spread spectrum technique to insert an alphanumeric code, such as patient's information, within the watermark. The watermark scheme is based on the Hermite transform as a bio-inspired image representation model. In order to evaluate the numerical integrity of the image data after watermarking, we perform a segmentation task based on deformable models. The segmentation technique is based on a vector-value level sets method such that, given a curve in a specific image, and subject to some constraints, the curve can evolve in order to detect objects. In order to stimulate the curve evolution we introduce simultaneously some image features like the gray level and the steered Hermite coefficients as texture descriptors. Segmentation performance was assessed by means of the Dice index and the Hausdorff distance. We tested different mark sizes and different insertion schemes on images that were later segmented either automatic or manual by physicians.

Content-independent embedding scheme for multi-modal medical image watermarking.

PubMed

Nyeem, Hussain; Boles, Wageeh; Boyd, Colin

2015-02-04

As the increasing adoption of information technology continues to offer better distant medical services, the distribution of, and remote access to digital medical images over public networks continues to grow significantly. Such use of medical images raises serious concerns for their continuous security protection, which digital watermarking has shown great potential to address. We present a content-independent embedding scheme for medical image watermarking. We observe that the perceptual content of medical images varies widely with their modalities. Recent medical image watermarking schemes are image-content dependent and thus they may suffer from inconsistent embedding capacity and visual artefacts. To attain the image content-independent embedding property, we generalise RONI (region of non-interest, to the medical professionals) selection process and use it for embedding by utilising RONI's least significant bit-planes. The proposed scheme thus avoids the need for RONI segmentation that incurs capacity and computational overheads. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed embedding scheme performs consistently over a dataset of 370 medical images including their 7 different modalities. Experimental results also verify how the state-of-the-art reversible schemes can have an inconsistent performance for different modalities of medical images. Our scheme has MSSIM (Mean Structural SIMilarity) larger than 0.999 with a deterministically adaptable embedding capacity. Our proposed image-content independent embedding scheme is modality-wise consistent, and maintains a good image quality of RONI while keeping all other pixels in the image untouched. Thus, with an appropriate watermarking framework (i.e., with the considerations of watermark generation, embedding and detection functions), our proposed scheme can be viable for the multi-modality medical image applications and distant medical services such as teleradiology and eHealth.

A wavelet domain adaptive image watermarking method based on chaotic encryption

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wei, Fang; Liu, Jian; Cao, Hanqiang; Yang, Jun

2009-10-01

A digital watermarking technique is a specific branch of steganography, which can be used in various applications, provides a novel way to solve security problems for multimedia information. In this paper, we proposed a kind of wavelet domain adaptive image digital watermarking method using chaotic stream encrypt and human eye visual property. The secret information that can be seen as a watermarking is hidden into a host image, which can be publicly accessed, so the transportation of the secret information will not attract the attention of illegal receiver. The experimental results show that the method is invisible and robust against some image processing.

A joint FED watermarking system using spatial fusion for verifying the security issues of teleradiology.

PubMed

Viswanathan, P; Krishna, P Venkata

2014-05-01

Teleradiology allows transmission of medical images for clinical data interpretation to provide improved e-health care access, delivery, and standards. The remote transmission raises various ethical and legal issues like image retention, fraud, privacy, malpractice liability, etc. A joint FED watermarking system means a joint fingerprint/encryption/dual watermarking system is proposed for addressing these issues. The system combines a region based substitution dual watermarking algorithm using spatial fusion, stream cipher algorithm using symmetric key, and fingerprint verification algorithm using invariants. This paper aims to give access to the outcomes of medical images with confidentiality, availability, integrity, and its origin. The watermarking, encryption, and fingerprint enrollment are conducted jointly in protection stage such that the extraction, decryption, and verification can be applied independently. The dual watermarking system, introducing two different embedding schemes, one used for patient data and other for fingerprint features, reduces the difficulty in maintenance of multiple documents like authentication data, personnel and diagnosis data, and medical images. The spatial fusion algorithm, which determines the region of embedding using threshold from the image to embed the encrypted patient data, follows the exact rules of fusion resulting in better quality than other fusion techniques. The four step stream cipher algorithm using symmetric key for encrypting the patient data with fingerprint verification system using algebraic invariants improves the robustness of the medical information. The experiment result of proposed scheme is evaluated for security and quality analysis in DICOM medical images resulted well in terms of attacks, quality index, and imperceptibility.

Robust image watermarking using DWT and SVD for copyright protection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Harjito, Bambang; Suryani, Esti

2017-02-01

The Objective of this paper is proposed a robust combined Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The RGB image is called a cover medium, and watermark image is converted into gray scale. Then, they are transformed using DWT so that they can be split into several subbands, namely sub-band LL2, LH2, HL2. The watermark image embeds into the cover medium on sub-band LL2. This scheme aims to obtain the higher robustness level than the previous method which performs of SVD matrix factorization image for copyright protection. The experiment results show that the proposed method has robustness against several image processing attacks such as Gaussian, Poisson and Salt and Pepper Noise. In these attacks, noise has average Normalized Correlation (NC) values of 0.574863 0.889784, 0.889782 respectively. The watermark image can be detected and extracted.

Music score watermarking by clef modifications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schmucker, Martin; Yan, Hongning

2003-06-01

In this paper we present a new method for hiding data in music scores. In contrast to previous published algorithms we investigate the possibilities of embedding information in clefs. Using the clef as information carrier has two advantages: First, a clef is present in each staff line which guarantees a fixed capacity. Second, the clef defines the reference system for musical symbols and music containing symbols, e.g. the notes and the rests, are not degraded by manipulations. Music scores must be robust against greyscale to binary conversion. As a consequence, the information is embedded by modifying the black and white distribution of pixels in certain areas. We evaluate simple image processing mechanisms based on erosion and dilation for embedding the information. For retrieving the watermark the b/w-distribution is extracted from the given clef. To solve the synchronization problem the watermarked clef is normalized in a pre-processing step. The normalization is based on moments. The areas used for watermarking are calculated by image segmentation techniques which consider the features of a clef. We analyze capacity and robustness of the proposed method using different parameters for our proposed method. This proposed method can be combined with other music score watermarking methods to increase the capacity of existing watermarking techniques.

Content Preserving Watermarking for Medical Images Using Shearlet Transform and SVD

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Favorskaya, M. N.; Savchina, E. I.

2017-05-01

Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) is a special field of a watermarking due to the requirements of the Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine (DICOM) standard since 1993. All 20 parts of the DICOM standard are revised periodically. The main idea of the MIW is to embed various types of information including the doctor's digital signature, fragile watermark, electronic patient record, and main watermark in a view of region of interest for the doctor into the host medical image. These four types of information are represented in different forms; some of them are encrypted according to the DICOM requirements. However, all types of information ought to be resulted into the generalized binary stream for embedding. The generalized binary stream may have a huge volume. Therefore, not all watermarking methods can be applied successfully. Recently, the digital shearlet transform had been introduced as a rigorous mathematical framework for the geometric representation of multi-dimensional data. Some modifications of the shearlet transform, particularly the non-subsampled shearlet transform, can be associated to a multi-resolution analysis that provides a fully shift-invariant, multi-scale, and multi-directional expansion. During experiments, a quality of the extracted watermarks under the JPEG compression and typical internet attacks was estimated using several metrics, including the peak signal to noise ratio, structural similarity index measure, and bit error rate.

A new approach of watermarking technique by means multichannel wavelet functions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Agreste, Santa; Puccio, Luigia

2012-12-01

The digital piracy involving images, music, movies, books, and so on, is a legal problem that has not found a solution. Therefore it becomes crucial to create and to develop methods and numerical algorithms in order to solve the copyright problems. In this paper we focus the attention on a new approach of watermarking technique applied to digital color images. Our aim is to describe the realized watermarking algorithm based on multichannel wavelet functions with multiplicity r = 3, called MCWM 1.0. We report a large experimentation and some important numerical results in order to show the robustness of the proposed algorithm to geometrical attacks.

Optical image hiding based on computational ghost imaging

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Le; Zhao, Shengmei; Cheng, Weiwen; Gong, Longyan; Chen, Hanwu

2016-05-01

Imaging hiding schemes play important roles in now big data times. They provide copyright protections of digital images. In the paper, we propose a novel image hiding scheme based on computational ghost imaging to have strong robustness and high security. The watermark is encrypted with the configuration of a computational ghost imaging system, and the random speckle patterns compose a secret key. Least significant bit algorithm is adopted to embed the watermark and both the second-order correlation algorithm and the compressed sensing (CS) algorithm are used to extract the watermark. The experimental and simulation results show that the authorized users can get the watermark with the secret key. The watermark image could not be retrieved when the eavesdropping ratio is less than 45% with the second-order correlation algorithm, whereas it is less than 20% with the TVAL3 CS reconstructed algorithm. In addition, the proposed scheme is robust against the 'salt and pepper' noise and image cropping degradations.

A robust watermarking scheme using lifting wavelet transform and singular value decomposition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bhardwaj, Anuj; Verma, Deval; Verma, Vivek Singh

2017-01-01

The present paper proposes a robust image watermarking scheme using lifting wavelet transform (LWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). Second level LWT is applied on host/cover image to decompose into different subbands. SVD is used to obtain singular values of watermark image and then these singular values are updated with the singular values of LH2 subband. The algorithm is tested on a number of benchmark images and it is found that the present algorithm is robust against different geometric and image processing operations. A comparison of the proposed scheme is performed with other existing schemes and observed that the present scheme is better not only in terms of robustness but also in terms of imperceptibility.

A new Watermarking System based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) in color biometric images.

PubMed

Dogan, Sengul; Tuncer, Turker; Avci, Engin; Gulten, Arif

2012-08-01

This paper recommend a biometric color images hiding approach An Watermarking System based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), which is used to protect the security and integrity of transmitted biometric color images. Watermarking is a very important hiding information (audio, video, color image, gray image) technique. It is commonly used on digital objects together with the developing technology in the last few years. One of the common methods used for hiding information on image files is DCT method which used in the frequency domain. In this study, DCT methods in order to embed watermark data into face images, without corrupting their features.

A New Pixels Flipping Method for Huge Watermarking Capacity of the Invoice Font Image

PubMed Central

Li, Li; Hou, Qingzheng; Lu, Jianfeng; Dai, Junping; Mao, Xiaoyang; Chang, Chin-Chen

2014-01-01

Invoice printing just has two-color printing, so invoice font image can be seen as binary image. To embed watermarks into invoice image, the pixels need to be flipped. The more huge the watermark is, the more the pixels need to be flipped. We proposed a new pixels flipping method in invoice image for huge watermarking capacity. The pixels flipping method includes one novel interpolation method for binary image, one flippable pixels evaluation mechanism, and one denoising method based on gravity center and chaos degree. The proposed interpolation method ensures that the invoice image keeps features well after scaling. The flippable pixels evaluation mechanism ensures that the pixels keep better connectivity and smoothness and the pattern has highest structural similarity after flipping. The proposed denoising method makes invoice font image smoother and fiter for human vision. Experiments show that the proposed flipping method not only keeps the invoice font structure well but also improves watermarking capacity. PMID:25489606

Capacity-optimized mp2 audio watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Steinebach, Martin; Dittmann, Jana

2003-06-01

Today a number of audio watermarking algorithms have been proposed, some of them at a quality making them suitable for commercial applications. The focus of most of these algorithms is copyright protection. Therefore, transparency and robustness are the most discussed and optimised parameters. But other applications for audio watermarking can also be identified stressing other parameters like complexity or payload. In our paper, we introduce a new mp2 audio watermarking algorithm optimised for high payload. Our algorithm uses the scale factors of an mp2 file for watermark embedding. They are grouped and masked based on a pseudo-random pattern generated from a secret key. In each group, we embed one bit. Depending on the bit to embed, we change the scale factors by adding 1 where necessary until it includes either more even or uneven scale factors. An uneven group has a 1 embedded, an even group a 0. The same rule is later applied to detect the watermark. The group size can be increased or decreased for transparency/payload trade-off. We embed 160 bits or more in an mp2 file per second without reducing perceived quality. As an application example, we introduce a prototypic Karaoke system displaying song lyrics embedded as a watermark.

A semi-blind logo watermarking scheme for color images by comparison and modification of DFT coefficients

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kusyk, Janusz; Eskicioglu, Ahmet M.

2005-10-01

Digital watermarking is considered to be a major technology for the protection of multimedia data. Some of the important applications are broadcast monitoring, copyright protection, and access control. In this paper, we present a semi-blind watermarking scheme for embedding a logo in color images using the DFT domain. After computing the DFT of the luminance layer of the cover image, the magnitudes of DFT coefficients are compared, and modified. A given watermark is embedded in three frequency bands: Low, middle, and high. Our experiments show that the watermarks extracted from the lower frequencies have the best visual quality for low pass filtering, adding Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, resizing, rotation, and scaling, and the watermarks extracted from the higher frequencies have the best visual quality for cropping, intensity adjustment, histogram equalization, and gamma correction. Extractions from the fragmented and translated image are identical to extractions from the unattacked watermarked image. The collusion and rewatermarking attacks do not provide the hacker with useful tools.

Dual Level Digital Watermarking for Images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Singh, V. K.; Singh, A. K.

2010-11-01

More than 700 years ago, watermarks were used in Italy to indicate the paper brand and the mill that produced it. By the 18th century watermarks began to be used as anti counterfeiting measures on money and other documents.The term watermark was introduced near the end of the 18th century. It was probably given because the marks resemble the effects of water on paper. The first example of a technology similar to digital watermarking is a patent filed in 1954 by Emil Hembrooke for identifying music works. In 1988, Komatsu and Tominaga appear to be the first to use the term "digital watermarking". Consider the following hypothetical situations. You go to a shop, buy some goods and at the counter you are given a currency note you have never come across before. How do you verify that it is not counterfeit? Or say you go to a stationery shop and ask for a ream of bond paper. How do you verify that you have actually been given what you asked for? How does a philatelist verify the authenticity of a stamp? In all these cases, the watermark is used to authenticate. Watermarks have been in existence almost from the time paper has been in use. The impression created by the mesh moulds on the slurry of fibre and water remains on the paper. It serves to identify the manufacturer and thus authenticate the product without actually degrading the aesthetics and utility of the stock. It also makes forgery significantly tougher. Even today, important government and legal documents are watermarked. But what is watermarking, when it comes to digital data? Information is no longer present on a physical material but is represented as a series of zeros and ones. Duplication of information is achieved easily by just reproducing that combination of zeros and ones. How then can one protect ownership rights and authenticate data? The digital watermark is the same as that of conventional watermarks.

An optical color image watermarking scheme by using compressive sensing with human visual characteristics in gyrator domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liansheng, Sui; Bei, Zhou; Zhanmin, Wang; Ailing, Tian

2017-05-01

A novel optical color image watermarking scheme considering human visual characteristics is presented in gyrator transform domain. Initially, an appropriate reference image is constructed of significant blocks chosen from the grayscale host image by evaluating visual characteristics such as visual entropy and edge entropy. Three components of the color watermark image are compressed based on compressive sensing, and the corresponding results are combined to form the grayscale watermark. Then, the frequency coefficients of the watermark image are fused into the frequency data of the gyrator-transformed reference image. The fused result is inversely transformed and partitioned, and eventually the watermarked image is obtained by mapping the resultant blocks into their original positions. The scheme can reconstruct the watermark with high perceptual quality and has the enhanced security due to high sensitivity of the secret keys. Importantly, the scheme can be implemented easily under the framework of double random phase encoding with the 4f optical system. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first report on embedding the color watermark into the grayscale host image which will be out of attacker's expectation. Simulation results are given to verify the feasibility and its superior performance in terms of noise and occlusion robustness.

Using digital watermarking to enhance security in wireless medical image transmission.

PubMed

Giakoumaki, Aggeliki; Perakis, Konstantinos; Banitsas, Konstantinos; Giokas, Konstantinos; Tachakra, Sapal; Koutsouris, Dimitris

2010-04-01

During the last few years, wireless networks have been increasingly used both inside hospitals and in patients' homes to transmit medical information. In general, wireless networks suffer from decreased security. However, digital watermarking can be used to secure medical information. In this study, we focused on combining wireless transmission and digital watermarking technologies to better secure the transmission of medical images within and outside the hospital. We utilized an integrated system comprising the wireless network and the digital watermarking module to conduct a series of tests. The test results were evaluated by medical consultants. They concluded that the images suffered no visible quality degradation and maintained their diagnostic integrity. The proposed integrated system presented reasonable stability, and its performance was comparable to that of a fixed network. This system can enhance security during the transmission of medical images through a wireless channel.

Watermarking on 3D mesh based on spherical wavelet transform.

PubMed

Jin, Jian-Qiu; Dai, Min-Ya; Bao, Hu-Jun; Peng, Qun-Sheng

2004-03-01

In this paper we propose a robust watermarking algorithm for 3D mesh. The algorithm is based on spherical wavelet transform. Our basic idea is to decompose the original mesh into a series of details at different scales by using spherical wavelet transform; the watermark is then embedded into the different levels of details. The embedding process includes: global sphere parameterization, spherical uniform sampling, spherical wavelet forward transform, embedding watermark, spherical wavelet inverse transform, and at last resampling the mesh watermarked to recover the topological connectivity of the original model. Experiments showed that our algorithm can improve the capacity of the watermark and the robustness of watermarking against attacks.

Imperceptible watermarking for security of fundus images in tele-ophthalmology applications and computer-aided diagnosis of retina diseases.

PubMed

Singh, Anushikha; Dutta, Malay Kishore

2017-12-01

The authentication and integrity verification of medical images is a critical and growing issue for patients in e-health services. Accurate identification of medical images and patient verification is an essential requirement to prevent error in medical diagnosis. The proposed work presents an imperceptible watermarking system to address the security issue of medical fundus images for tele-ophthalmology applications and computer aided automated diagnosis of retinal diseases. In the proposed work, patient identity is embedded in fundus image in singular value decomposition domain with adaptive quantization parameter to maintain perceptual transparency for variety of fundus images like healthy fundus or disease affected image. In the proposed method insertion of watermark in fundus image does not affect the automatic image processing diagnosis of retinal objects & pathologies which ensure uncompromised computer-based diagnosis associated with fundus image. Patient ID is correctly recovered from watermarked fundus image for integrity verification of fundus image at the diagnosis centre. The proposed watermarking system is tested in a comprehensive database of fundus images and results are convincing. results indicate that proposed watermarking method is imperceptible and it does not affect computer vision based automated diagnosis of retinal diseases. Correct recovery of patient ID from watermarked fundus image makes the proposed watermarking system applicable for authentication of fundus images for computer aided diagnosis and Tele-ophthalmology applications. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Watermarking protocols for authentication and ownership protection based on timestamps and holograms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dittmann, Jana; Steinebach, Martin; Croce Ferri, Lucilla

2002-04-01

Digital watermarking has become an accepted technology for enabling multimedia protection schemes. One problem here is the security of these schemes. Without a suitable framework, watermarks can be replaced and manipulated. We discuss different protocols providing security against rightful ownership attacks and other fraud attempts. We compare the characteristics of existing protocols for different media like direct embedding or seed based and required attributes of the watermarking technology like robustness or payload. We introduce two new media independent protocol schemes for rightful ownership authentication. With the first scheme we ensure security of digital watermarks used for ownership protection with a combination of two watermarks: first watermark of the copyright holder and a second watermark from a Trusted Third Party (TTP). It is based on hologram embedding and the watermark consists of e.g. a company logo. As an example we use digital images and specify the properties of the embedded additional security information. We identify components necessary for the security protocol like timestamp, PKI and cryptographic algorithms. The second scheme is used for authentication. It is designed for invertible watermarking applications which require high data integrity. We combine digital signature schemes and digital watermarking to provide a public verifiable integrity. The original data can only be reproduced with a secret key. Both approaches provide solutions for copyright and authentication watermarking and are introduced for image data but can be easily adopted for video and audio data as well.

Reversible watermarking for knowledge digest embedding and reliability control in medical images.

PubMed

Coatrieux, Gouenou; Le Guillou, Clara; Cauvin, Jean-Michel; Roux, Christian

2009-03-01

To improve medical image sharing in applications such as e-learning or remote diagnosis aid, we propose to make the image more usable by watermarking it with a digest of its associated knowledge. The aim of such a knowledge digest (KD) is for it to be used for retrieving similar images with either the same findings or differential diagnoses. It summarizes the symbolic descriptions of the image, the symbolic descriptions of the findings semiology, and the similarity rules that contribute to balancing the importance of previous descriptors when comparing images. Instead of modifying the image file format by adding some extra header information, watermarking is used to embed the KD in the pixel gray-level values of the corresponding images. When shared through open networks, watermarking also helps to convey reliability proofs (integrity and authenticity) of an image and its KD. The interest of these new image functionalities is illustrated in the updating of the distributed users' databases within the framework of an e-learning application demonstrator of endoscopic semiology.

Embedded importance watermarking for image verification in radiology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Osborne, Domininc; Rogers, D.; Sorell, M.; Abbott, Derek

2004-03-01

Digital medical images used in radiology are quite different to everyday continuous tone images. Radiology images require that all detailed diagnostic information can be extracted, which traditionally constrains digital medical images to be of large size and stored without loss of information. In order to transmit diagnostic images over a narrowband wireless communication link for remote diagnosis, lossy compression schemes must be used. This involves discarding detailed information and compressing the data, making it more susceptible to error. The loss of image detail and incidental degradation occurring during transmission have potential legal accountability issues, especially in the case of the null diagnosis of a tumor. The work proposed here investigates techniques for verifying the voracity of medical images - in particular, detailing the use of embedded watermarking as an objective means to ensure that important parts of the medical image can be verified. We propose a result to show how embedded watermarking can be used to differentiate contextual from detailed information. The type of images that will be used include spiral hairline fractures and small tumors, which contain the essential diagnostic high spatial frequency information.

Reversible Watermarking Surviving JPEG Compression.

PubMed

Zain, J; Clarke, M

2005-01-01

This paper will discuss the properties of watermarking medical images. We will also discuss the possibility of such images being compressed by JPEG and give an overview of JPEG compression. We will then propose a watermarking scheme that is reversible and robust to JPEG compression. The purpose is to verify the integrity and authenticity of medical images. We used 800x600x8 bits ultrasound (US) images in our experiment. SHA-256 of the image is then embedded in the Least significant bits (LSB) of an 8x8 block in the Region of Non Interest (RONI). The image is then compressed using JPEG and decompressed using Photoshop 6.0. If the image has not been altered, the watermark extracted will match the hash (SHA256) of the original image. The result shown that the embedded watermark is robust to JPEG compression up to image quality 60 (~91% compressed).

Optical/digital identification/verification system based on digital watermarking technology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Herrigel, Alexander; Voloshynovskiy, Sviatoslav V.; Hrytskiv, Zenon D.

2000-06-01

This paper presents a new approach for the secure integrity verification of driver licenses, passports or other analogue identification documents. The system embeds (detects) the reference number of the identification document with the DCT watermark technology in (from) the owner photo of the identification document holder. During verification the reference number is extracted and compared with the reference number printed in the identification document. The approach combines optical and digital image processing techniques. The detection system must be able to scan an analogue driver license or passport, convert the image of this document into a digital representation and then apply the watermark verification algorithm to check the payload of the embedded watermark. If the payload of the watermark is identical with the printed visual reference number of the issuer, the verification was successful and the passport or driver license has not been modified. This approach constitutes a new class of application for the watermark technology, which was originally targeted for the copyright protection of digital multimedia data. The presented approach substantially increases the security of the analogue identification documents applied in many European countries.

Watermarking textures in video games

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Huajian; Berchtold, Waldemar; Schäfer, Marcel; Lieb, Patrick; Steinebach, Martin

2014-02-01

Digital watermarking is a promising solution to video game piracy. In this paper, based on the analysis of special challenges and requirements in terms of watermarking textures in video games, a novel watermarking scheme for DDS textures in video games is proposed. To meet the performance requirements in video game applications, the proposed algorithm embeds the watermark message directly in the compressed stream in DDS files and can be straightforwardly applied in watermark container technique for real-time embedding. Furthermore, the embedding approach achieves high watermark payload to handle collusion secure fingerprinting codes with extreme length. Hence, the scheme is resistant to collusion attacks, which is indispensable in video game applications. The proposed scheme is evaluated in aspects of transparency, robustness, security and performance. Especially, in addition to classical objective evaluation, the visual quality and playing experience of watermarked games is assessed subjectively in game playing.

Chrominance watermark for mobile applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Reed, Alastair; Rogers, Eliot; James, Dan

2010-01-01

Creating an imperceptible watermark which can be read by a broad range of cell phone cameras is a difficult problem. The problems are caused by the inherently low resolution and noise levels of typical cell phone cameras. The quality limitations of these devices compared to a typical digital camera are caused by the small size of the cell phone and cost trade-offs made by the manufacturer. In order to achieve this, a low resolution watermark is required which can be resolved by a typical cell phone camera. The visibility of a traditional luminance watermark was too great at this lower resolution, so a chrominance watermark was developed. The chrominance watermark takes advantage of the relatively low sensitivity of the human visual system to chrominance changes. This enables a chrominance watermark to be inserted into an image which is imperceptible to the human eye but can be read using a typical cell phone camera. Sample images will be presented showing images with a very low visibility which can be easily read by a typical cell phone camera.

A QR Code Based Zero-Watermarking Scheme for Authentication of Medical Images in Teleradiology Cloud

PubMed Central

Seenivasagam, V.; Velumani, R.

2013-01-01

Healthcare institutions adapt cloud based archiving of medical images and patient records to share them efficiently. Controlled access to these records and authentication of images must be enforced to mitigate fraudulent activities and medical errors. This paper presents a zero-watermarking scheme implemented in the composite Contourlet Transform (CT)—Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) domain for unambiguous authentication of medical images. Further, a framework is proposed for accessing patient records based on the watermarking scheme. The patient identification details and a link to patient data encoded into a Quick Response (QR) code serves as the watermark. In the proposed scheme, the medical image is not subjected to degradations due to watermarking. Patient authentication and authorized access to patient data are realized on combining a Secret Share with the Master Share constructed from invariant features of the medical image. The Hu's invariant image moments are exploited in creating the Master Share. The proposed system is evaluated with Checkmark software and is found to be robust to both geometric and non geometric attacks. PMID:23970943

A QR code based zero-watermarking scheme for authentication of medical images in teleradiology cloud.

PubMed

Seenivasagam, V; Velumani, R

2013-01-01

Healthcare institutions adapt cloud based archiving of medical images and patient records to share them efficiently. Controlled access to these records and authentication of images must be enforced to mitigate fraudulent activities and medical errors. This paper presents a zero-watermarking scheme implemented in the composite Contourlet Transform (CT)-Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) domain for unambiguous authentication of medical images. Further, a framework is proposed for accessing patient records based on the watermarking scheme. The patient identification details and a link to patient data encoded into a Quick Response (QR) code serves as the watermark. In the proposed scheme, the medical image is not subjected to degradations due to watermarking. Patient authentication and authorized access to patient data are realized on combining a Secret Share with the Master Share constructed from invariant features of the medical image. The Hu's invariant image moments are exploited in creating the Master Share. The proposed system is evaluated with Checkmark software and is found to be robust to both geometric and non geometric attacks.

An Efficient Audio Watermarking Algorithm in Frequency Domain for Copyright Protection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dhar, Pranab Kumar; Khan, Mohammad Ibrahim; Kim, Cheol-Hong; Kim, Jong-Myon

Digital Watermarking plays an important role for copyright protection of multimedia data. This paper proposes a new watermarking system in frequency domain for copyright protection of digital audio. In our proposed watermarking system, the original audio is segmented into non-overlapping frames. Watermarks are then embedded into the selected prominent peaks in the magnitude spectrum of each frame. Watermarks are extracted by performing the inverse operation of watermark embedding process. Simulation results indicate that the proposed watermarking system is highly robust against various kinds of attacks such as noise addition, cropping, re-sampling, re-quantization, MP3 compression, and low-pass filtering. Our proposed watermarking system outperforms Cox's method in terms of imperceptibility, while keeping comparable robustness with the Cox's method. Our proposed system achieves SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) values ranging from 20 dB to 28 dB, in contrast to Cox's method which achieves SNR values ranging from only 14 dB to 23 dB.

Watermarking 3D Objects for Verification

DTIC Science & Technology

1999-01-01

signal (audio/ image /video) pro- cessing and steganography fields, and even newer to the computer graphics community. Inherently, digital watermarking of...quality images , and digital video. The field of digital watermarking is relatively new, and many of its terms have not been well defined. Among the dif...ferent media types, watermarking of 2D still images is comparatively better studied. Inherently, digital water- marking of 3D objects remains a

Wavelet-based reversible watermarking for authentication

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tian, Jun

2002-04-01

In the digital information age, digital content (audio, image, and video) can be easily copied, manipulated, and distributed. Copyright protection and content authentication of digital content has become an urgent problem to content owners and distributors. Digital watermarking has provided a valuable solution to this problem. Based on its application scenario, most digital watermarking methods can be divided into two categories: robust watermarking and fragile watermarking. As a special subset of fragile watermark, reversible watermark (which is also called lossless watermark, invertible watermark, erasable watermark) enables the recovery of the original, unwatermarked content after the watermarked content has been detected to be authentic. Such reversibility to get back unwatermarked content is highly desired in sensitive imagery, such as military data and medical data. In this paper we present a reversible watermarking method based on an integer wavelet transform. We look into the binary representation of each wavelet coefficient and embed an extra bit to expandable wavelet coefficient. The location map of all expanded coefficients will be coded by JBIG2 compression and these coefficient values will be losslessly compressed by arithmetic coding. Besides these two compressed bit streams, an SHA-256 hash of the original image will also be embedded for authentication purpose.

A Novel Texture-Quantization-Based Reversible Multiple Watermarking Scheme Applied to Health Information System.

PubMed

Turuk, Mousami; Dhande, Ashwin

2018-04-01

The recent innovations in information and communication technologies have appreciably changed the panorama of health information system (HIS). These advances provide new means to process, handle, and share medical images and also augment the medical image security issues in terms of confidentiality, reliability, and integrity. Digital watermarking has emerged as new era that offers acceptable solutions to the security issues in HIS. Texture is a significant feature to detect the embedding sites in an image, which further leads to substantial improvement in the robustness. However, considering the perspective of digital watermarking, this feature has received meager attention in the reported literature. This paper exploits the texture property of an image and presents a novel hybrid texture-quantization-based approach for reversible multiple watermarking. The watermarked image quality has been accessed by peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity measure (SSIM), and universal image quality index (UIQI), and the obtained results are superior to the state-of-the-art methods. The algorithm has been evaluated on a variety of medical imaging modalities (CT, MRA, MRI, US) and robustness has been verified, considering various image processing attacks including JPEG compression. The proposed scheme offers additional security using repetitive embedding of BCH encoded watermarks and ADM encrypted ECG signal. Experimental results achieved a maximum of 22,616 bits hiding capacity with PSNR of 53.64 dB.

Region of interest based robust watermarking scheme for adaptation in small displays

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vivekanandhan, Sapthagirivasan; K. B., Kishore Mohan; Vemula, Krishna Manohar

2010-02-01

Now-a-days Multimedia data can be easily replicated and the copyright is not legally protected. Cryptography does not allow the use of digital data in its original form and once the data is decrypted, it is no longer protected. Here we have proposed a new double protected digital image watermarking algorithm, which can embed the watermark image blocks into the adjacent regions of the host image itself based on their blocks similarity coefficient which is robust to various noise effects like Poisson noise, Gaussian noise, Random noise and thereby provide double security from various noises and hackers. As instrumentation application requires a much accurate data, the watermark image which is to be extracted back from the watermarked image must be immune to various noise effects. Our results provide better extracted image compared to the present/existing techniques and in addition we have done resizing the same for various displays. Adaptive resizing for various size displays is being experimented wherein we crop the required information in a frame, zoom it for a large display or resize for a small display using a threshold value and in either cases background is not given much importance but it is only the fore-sight object which gains importance which will surely be helpful in performing surgeries.

Novel Variants of a Histogram Shift-Based Reversible Watermarking Technique for Medical Images to Improve Hiding Capacity

PubMed Central

Tuckley, Kushal

2017-01-01

In telemedicine systems, critical medical data is shared on a public communication channel. This increases the risk of unauthorised access to patient's information. This underlines the importance of secrecy and authentication for the medical data. This paper presents two innovative variations of classical histogram shift methods to increase the hiding capacity. The first technique divides the image into nonoverlapping blocks and embeds the watermark individually using the histogram method. The second method separates the region of interest and embeds the watermark only in the region of noninterest. This approach preserves the medical information intact. This method finds its use in critical medical cases. The high PSNR (above 45 dB) obtained for both techniques indicates imperceptibility of the approaches. Experimental results illustrate superiority of the proposed approaches when compared with other methods based on histogram shifting techniques. These techniques improve embedding capacity by 5–15% depending on the image type, without affecting the quality of the watermarked image. Both techniques also enable lossless reconstruction of the watermark and the host medical image. A higher embedding capacity makes the proposed approaches attractive for medical image watermarking applications without compromising the quality of the image. PMID:29104744

Enhancing security of fingerprints through contextual biometric watermarking.

PubMed

Noore, Afzel; Singh, Richa; Vatsa, Mayank; Houck, Max M

2007-07-04

This paper presents a novel digital watermarking technique using face and demographic text data as multiple watermarks for verifying the chain of custody and protecting the integrity of a fingerprint image. The watermarks are embedded in selected texture regions of a fingerprint image using discrete wavelet transform. Experimental results show that modifications in these locations are visually imperceptible and maintain the minutiae details. The integrity of the fingerprint image is verified through the high matching scores obtained from an automatic fingerprint identification system. There is also a high degree of visual correlation between the embedded images, and the extracted images from the watermarked fingerprint. The degree of similarity is computed using pixel-based metrics and human visual system metrics. The results also show that the proposed watermarked fingerprint and the extracted images are resilient to common attacks such as compression, filtering, and noise.

Quantum watermarking scheme through Arnold scrambling and LSB steganography

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhou, Ri-Gui; Hu, Wenwen; Fan, Ping

2017-09-01

Based on the NEQR of quantum images, a new quantum gray-scale image watermarking scheme is proposed through Arnold scrambling and least significant bit (LSB) steganography. The sizes of the carrier image and the watermark image are assumed to be 2n× 2n and n× n, respectively. Firstly, a classical n× n sized watermark image with 8-bit gray scale is expanded to a 2n× 2n sized image with 2-bit gray scale. Secondly, through the module of PA-MOD N, the expanded watermark image is scrambled to a meaningless image by the Arnold transform. Then, the expanded scrambled image is embedded into the carrier image by the steganography method of LSB. Finally, the time complexity analysis is given. The simulation experiment results show that our quantum circuit has lower time complexity, and the proposed watermarking scheme is superior to others.

Watermarking scheme based on singular value decomposition and homomorphic transform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Verma, Deval; Aggarwal, A. K.; Agarwal, Himanshu

2017-10-01

A semi-blind watermarking scheme based on singular-value-decomposition (SVD) and homomorphic transform is pro-posed. This scheme ensures the digital security of an eight bit gray scale image by inserting an invisible eight bit gray scale wa-termark into it. The key approach of the scheme is to apply the homomorphic transform on the host image to obtain its reflectance component. The watermark is embedded into the singular values that are obtained by applying the singular value decomposition on the reflectance component. Peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR), normalized-correlation-coefficient (NCC) and mean-structural-similarity-index-measure (MSSIM) are used to evaluate the performance of the scheme. Invisibility of watermark is ensured by visual inspection and high value of PSNR of watermarked images. Presence of watermark is ensured by visual inspection and high values of NCC and MSSIM of extracted watermarks. Robustness of the scheme is verified by high values of NCC and MSSIM for attacked watermarked images.

StirMark Benchmark: audio watermarking attacks based on lossy compression

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Steinebach, Martin; Lang, Andreas; Dittmann, Jana

2002-04-01

StirMark Benchmark is a well-known evaluation tool for watermarking robustness. Additional attacks are added to it continuously. To enable application based evaluation, in our paper we address attacks against audio watermarks based on lossy audio compression algorithms to be included in the test environment. We discuss the effect of different lossy compression algorithms like MPEG-2 audio Layer 3, Ogg or VQF on a selection of audio test data. Our focus is on changes regarding the basic characteristics of the audio data like spectrum or average power and on removal of embedded watermarks. Furthermore we compare results of different watermarking algorithms and show that lossy compression is still a challenge for most of them. There are two strategies for adding evaluation of robustness against lossy compression to StirMark Benchmark: (a) use of existing free compression algorithms (b) implementation of a generic lossy compression simulation. We discuss how such a model can be implemented based on the results of our tests. This method is less complex, as no real psycho acoustic model has to be applied. Our model can be used for audio watermarking evaluation of numerous application fields. As an example, we describe its importance for e-commerce applications with watermarking security.

Synchronization-insensitive video watermarking using structured noise pattern

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Setyawan, Iwan; Kakes, Geerd; Lagendijk, Reginald L.

2002-04-01

For most watermarking methods, preserving the synchronization between the watermark embedded in a digital data (image, audio or video) and the watermark detector is critical to the success of the watermark detection process. Many digital watermarking attacks exploit this fact by disturbing the synchronization of the watermark and the watermark detector, and thus disabling proper watermark detection without having to actually remove the watermark from the data. Some techniques have been proposed in the literature to deal with this problem. Most of these techniques employ methods to reverse the distortion caused by the attack and then try to detect the watermark from the repaired data. In this paper, we propose a watermarking technique that is not sensitive to synchronization. This technique uses a structured noise pattern and embeds the watermark payload into the geometrical structure of the embedded pattern.

Wavelet versus DCT-based spread spectrum watermarking of image databases

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mitrea, Mihai P.; Zaharia, Titus B.; Preteux, Francoise J.; Vlad, Adriana

2004-05-01

This paper addresses the issue of oblivious robust watermarking, within the framework of colour still image database protection. We present an original method which complies with all the requirements nowadays imposed to watermarking applications: robustness (e.g. low-pass filtering, print & scan, StirMark), transparency (both quality and fidelity), low probability of false alarm, obliviousness and multiple bit recovering. The mark is generated from a 64 bit message (be it a logo, a serial number, etc.) by means of a Spread Spectrum technique and is embedded into DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) domain, into certain low frequency coefficients, selected according to the hierarchy of their absolute values. The best results were provided by the (9,7) bi-orthogonal transform. The experiments were carried out on 1200 image sequences, each of them of 32 images. Note that these sequences represented several types of images: natural, synthetic, medical, etc. and each time we obtained the same good results. These results are compared with those we already obtained for the DCT domain, the differences being pointed out and discussed.

Invariant domain watermarking using heaviside function of order alpha and fractional Gaussian field.

PubMed

Abbasi, Almas; Woo, Chaw Seng; Ibrahim, Rabha Waell; Islam, Saeed

2015-01-01

Digital image watermarking is an important technique for the authentication of multimedia content and copyright protection. Conventional digital image watermarking techniques are often vulnerable to geometric distortions such as Rotation, Scaling, and Translation (RST). These distortions desynchronize the watermark information embedded in an image and thus disable watermark detection. To solve this problem, we propose an RST invariant domain watermarking technique based on fractional calculus. We have constructed a domain using Heaviside function of order alpha (HFOA). The HFOA models the signal as a polynomial for watermark embedding. The watermark is embedded in all the coefficients of the image. We have also constructed a fractional variance formula using fractional Gaussian field. A cross correlation method based on the fractional Gaussian field is used for watermark detection. Furthermore the proposed method enables blind watermark detection where the original image is not required during the watermark detection thereby making it more practical than non-blind watermarking techniques. Experimental results confirmed that the proposed technique has a high level of robustness.

Invariant Domain Watermarking Using Heaviside Function of Order Alpha and Fractional Gaussian Field

PubMed Central

Abbasi, Almas; Woo, Chaw Seng; Ibrahim, Rabha Waell; Islam, Saeed

2015-01-01

Digital image watermarking is an important technique for the authentication of multimedia content and copyright protection. Conventional digital image watermarking techniques are often vulnerable to geometric distortions such as Rotation, Scaling, and Translation (RST). These distortions desynchronize the watermark information embedded in an image and thus disable watermark detection. To solve this problem, we propose an RST invariant domain watermarking technique based on fractional calculus. We have constructed a domain using Heaviside function of order alpha (HFOA). The HFOA models the signal as a polynomial for watermark embedding. The watermark is embedded in all the coefficients of the image. We have also constructed a fractional variance formula using fractional Gaussian field. A cross correlation method based on the fractional Gaussian field is used for watermark detection. Furthermore the proposed method enables blind watermark detection where the original image is not required during the watermark detection thereby making it more practical than non-blind watermarking techniques. Experimental results confirmed that the proposed technique has a high level of robustness. PMID:25884854

LDFT-based watermarking resilient to local desynchronization attacks.

PubMed

Tian, Huawei; Zhao, Yao; Ni, Rongrong; Qin, Lunming; Li, Xuelong

2013-12-01

Up to now, a watermarking scheme that is robust against desynchronization attacks (DAs) is still a grand challenge. Most image watermarking resynchronization schemes in literature can survive individual global DAs (e.g., rotation, scaling, translation, and other affine transforms), but few are resilient to challenging cropping and local DAs. The main reason is that robust features for watermark synchronization are only globally invariable rather than locally invariable. In this paper, we present a blind image watermarking resynchronization scheme against local transform attacks. First, we propose a new feature transform named local daisy feature transform (LDFT), which is not only globally but also locally invariable. Then, the binary space partitioning (BSP) tree is used to partition the geometrically invariant LDFT space. In the BSP tree, the location of each pixel is fixed under global transform, local transform, and cropping. Lastly, the watermarking sequence is embedded bit by bit into each leaf node of the BSP tree by using the logarithmic quantization index modulation watermarking embedding method. Simulation results show that the proposed watermarking scheme can survive numerous kinds of distortions, including common image-processing attacks, local and global DAs, and noninvertible cropping.

Content-based audio authentication using a hierarchical patchwork watermark embedding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gulbis, Michael; Müller, Erika

2010-05-01

Content-based audio authentication watermarking techniques extract perceptual relevant audio features, which are robustly embedded into the audio file to protect. Manipulations of the audio file are detected on the basis of changes between the original embedded feature information and the anew extracted features during verification. The main challenges of content-based watermarking are on the one hand the identification of a suitable audio feature to distinguish between content preserving and malicious manipulations. On the other hand the development of a watermark, which is robust against content preserving modifications and able to carry the whole authentication information. The payload requirements are significantly higher compared to transaction watermarking or copyright protection. Finally, the watermark embedding should not influence the feature extraction to avoid false alarms. Current systems still lack a sufficient alignment of watermarking algorithm and feature extraction. In previous work we developed a content-based audio authentication watermarking approach. The feature is based on changes in DCT domain over time. A patchwork algorithm based watermark was used to embed multiple one bit watermarks. The embedding process uses the feature domain without inflicting distortions to the feature. The watermark payload is limited by the feature extraction, more precisely the critical bands. The payload is inverse proportional to segment duration of the audio file segmentation. Transparency behavior was analyzed in dependence of segment size and thus the watermark payload. At a segment duration of about 20 ms the transparency shows an optimum (measured in units of Objective Difference Grade). Transparency and/or robustness are fast decreased for working points beyond this area. Therefore, these working points are unsuitable to gain further payload, needed for the embedding of the whole authentication information. In this paper we present a hierarchical extension

Countermeasures for unintentional and intentional video watermarking attacks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Deguillaume, Frederic; Csurka, Gabriela; Pun, Thierry

2000-05-01

These last years, the rapidly growing digital multimedia market has revealed an urgent need for effective copyright protection mechanisms. Therefore, digital audio, image and video watermarking has recently become a very active area of research, as a solution to this problem. Many important issues have been pointed out, one of them being the robustness to non-intentional and intentional attacks. This paper studies some attacks and proposes countermeasures applied to videos. General attacks are lossy copying/transcoding such as MPEG compression and digital/analog (D/A) conversion, changes of frame-rate, changes of display format, and geometrical distortions. More specific attacks are sequence edition, and statistical attacks such as averaging or collusion. Averaging attack consists of averaging locally consecutive frames to cancel the watermark. This attack works well for schemes which embed random independent marks into frames. In the collusion attack the watermark is estimated from single frames (based on image denoising), and averaged over different scenes for better accuracy. The estimated watermark is then subtracted from each frame. Collusion requires that the same mark is embedded into all frames. The proposed countermeasures first ensures robustness to general attacks by spread spectrum encoding in the frequency domain and by the use of an additional template. Secondly, a Bayesian criterion, evaluating the probability of a correctly decoded watermark, is used for rejection of outliers, and to implement an algorithm against statistical attacks. The idea is to embed randomly chosen marks among a finite set of marks, into subsequences of videos which are long enough to resist averaging attacks, but short enough to avoid collusion attacks. The Bayesian criterion is needed to select the correct mark at the decoding step. Finally, the paper presents experimental results showing the robustness of the proposed method.

Security of fragile authentication watermarks with localization

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fridrich, Jessica

2002-04-01

In this paper, we study the security of fragile image authentication watermarks that can localize tampered areas. We start by comparing the goals, capabilities, and advantages of image authentication based on watermarking and cryptography. Then we point out some common security problems of current fragile authentication watermarks with localization and classify attacks on authentication watermarks into five categories. By investigating the attacks and vulnerabilities of current schemes, we propose a variation of the Wong scheme18 that is fast, simple, cryptographically secure, and resistant to all known attacks, including the Holliman-Memon attack9. In the new scheme, a special symmetry structure in the logo is used to authenticate the block content, while the logo itself carries information about the block origin (block index, the image index or time stamp, author ID, etc.). Because the authentication of the content and its origin are separated, it is possible to easily identify swapped blocks between images and accurately detect cropped areas, while being able to accurately localize tampered pixels.

A joint asymmetric watermarking and image encryption scheme

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boato, G.; Conotter, V.; De Natale, F. G. B.; Fontanari, C.

2008-02-01

Here we introduce a novel watermarking paradigm designed to be both asymmetric, i.e., involving a private key for embedding and a public key for detection, and commutative with a suitable encryption scheme, allowing both to cipher watermarked data and to mark encrypted data without interphering with the detection process. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the above principles, we present an explicit example where the watermarking part, based on elementary linear algebra, and the encryption part, exploiting a secret random permutation, are integrated in a commutative scheme.

A Secure Watermarking Scheme for Buyer-Seller Identification and Copyright Protection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ahmed, Fawad; Sattar, Farook; Siyal, Mohammed Yakoob; Yu, Dan

2006-12-01

We propose a secure watermarking scheme that integrates watermarking with cryptography for addressing some important issues in copyright protection. We address three copyright protection issues—buyer-seller identification, copyright infringement, and ownership verification. By buyer-seller identification, we mean that a successful watermark extraction at the buyer's end will reveal the identities of the buyer and seller of the watermarked image. For copyright infringement, our proposed scheme enables the seller to identify the specific buyer from whom an illegal copy of the watermarked image has originated, and further prove this fact to a third party. For multiple ownership claims, our scheme enables a legal seller to claim his/her ownership in the court of law. We will show that the combination of cryptography with watermarking not only increases the security of the overall scheme, but it also enables to associate identities of buyer/seller with their respective watermarked images.

A Novel Application for Text Watermarking in Digital Reading

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Jin; Li, Qing-Cheng; Wang, Cong; Fang, Ji

Although watermarking research has made great strides in theoretical aspect, its lack of application in business could not be covered. It is due to few people pays attention to usage of the information carried by watermarking. This paper proposes a new watermarking application method. After digital document being reorganized with advertisement together, watermarking is designed to carry this structure of new document. It will release advertisement as interference information under attack. On the one hand, reducing the quality of digital works could inhabit unauthorized distribution. On the other hand, advertisement can benefit copyright holders as compensation. Moreover implementation detail, attack evaluation and watermarking algorithm correlation are also discussed through an experiment based on txt file.

Geometrically robust image watermarking by sector-shaped partitioning of geometric-invariant regions.

PubMed

Tian, Huawei; Zhao, Yao; Ni, Rongrong; Cao, Gang

2009-11-23

In a feature-based geometrically robust watermarking system, it is a challenging task to detect geometric-invariant regions (GIRs) which can survive a broad range of image processing operations. Instead of commonly used Harris detector or Mexican hat wavelet method, a more robust corner detector named multi-scale curvature product (MSCP) is adopted to extract salient features in this paper. Based on such features, disk-like GIRs are found, which consists of three steps. First, robust edge contours are extracted. Then, MSCP is utilized to detect the centers for GIRs. Third, the characteristic scale selection is performed to calculate the radius of each GIR. A novel sector-shaped partitioning method for the GIRs is designed, which can divide a GIR into several sector discs with the help of the most important corner (MIC). The watermark message is then embedded bit by bit in each sector by using Quantization Index Modulation (QIM). The GIRs and the divided sector discs are invariant to geometric transforms, so the watermarking method inherently has high robustness against geometric attacks. Experimental results show that the scheme has a better robustness against various image processing operations including common processing attacks, affine transforms, cropping, and random bending attack (RBA) than the previous approaches.

Realisation and robustness evaluation of a blind spatial domain watermarking technique

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Parah, Shabir A.; Sheikh, Javaid A.; Assad, Umer I.; Bhat, Ghulam M.

2017-04-01

A blind digital image watermarking scheme based on spatial domain is presented and investigated in this paper. The watermark has been embedded in intermediate significant bit planes besides the least significant bit plane at the address locations determined by pseudorandom address vector (PAV). The watermark embedding using PAV makes it difficult for an adversary to locate the watermark and hence adds to security of the system. The scheme has been evaluated to ascertain the spatial locations that are robust to various image processing and geometric attacks JPEG compression, additive white Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise, filtering and rotation. The experimental results obtained, reveal an interesting fact, that, for all the above mentioned attacks, other than rotation, higher the bit plane in which watermark is embedded more robust the system. Further, the perceptual quality of the watermarked images obtained in the proposed system has been compared with some state-of-art watermarking techniques. The proposed technique outperforms the techniques under comparison, even if compared with the worst case peak signal-to-noise ratio obtained in our scheme.

Effect of Watermarking on Diagnostic Preservation of Atherosclerotic Ultrasound Video in Stroke Telemedicine.

PubMed

Dey, Nilanjan; Bose, Soumyo; Das, Achintya; Chaudhuri, Sheli Sinha; Saba, Luca; Shafique, Shoaib; Nicolaides, Andrew; Suri, Jasjit S

2016-04-01

Embedding of diagnostic and health care information requires secure encryption and watermarking. This research paper presents a comprehensive study for the behavior of some well established watermarking algorithms in frequency domain for the preservation of stroke-based diagnostic parameters. Two different sets of watermarking algorithms namely: two correlation-based (binary logo hiding) and two singular value decomposition (SVD)-based (gray logo hiding) watermarking algorithms are used for embedding ownership logo. The diagnostic parameters in atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video are namely: (a) bulb identification and recognition which consists of identifying the bulb edge points in far and near carotid walls; (b) carotid bulb diameter; and (c) carotid lumen thickness all along the carotid artery. The tested data set consists of carotid atherosclerotic movies taken under IRB protocol from University of Indiana Hospital, USA-AtheroPoint™ (Roseville, CA, USA) joint pilot study. ROC (receiver operating characteristic) analysis was performed on the bulb detection process that showed an accuracy and sensitivity of 100 % each, respectively. The diagnostic preservation (DPsystem) for SVD-based approach was above 99 % with PSNR (Peak signal-to-noise ratio) above 41, ensuring the retention of diagnostic parameter devalorization as an effect of watermarking. Thus, the fully automated proposed system proved to be an efficient method for watermarking the atherosclerotic ultrasound video for stroke application.

A good performance watermarking LDPC code used in high-speed optical fiber communication system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Wenbo; Li, Chao; Zhang, Xiaoguang; Xi, Lixia; Tang, Xianfeng; He, Wenxue

2015-07-01

A watermarking LDPC code, which is a strategy designed to improve the performance of the traditional LDPC code, was introduced. By inserting some pre-defined watermarking bits into original LDPC code, we can obtain a more correct estimation about the noise level in the fiber channel. Then we use them to modify the probability distribution function (PDF) used in the initial process of belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithm. This algorithm was tested in a 128 Gb/s PDM-DQPSK optical communication system and results showed that the watermarking LDPC code had a better tolerances to polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and nonlinearity than that of traditional LDPC code. Also, by losing about 2.4% of redundancy for watermarking bits, the decoding efficiency of the watermarking LDPC code is about twice of the traditional one.

Two-Layer Fragile Watermarking Method Secured with Chaotic Map for Authentication of Digital Holy Quran

PubMed Central

Khalil, Mohammed S.; Khan, Muhammad Khurram; Alginahi, Yasser M.

2014-01-01

This paper presents a novel watermarking method to facilitate the authentication and detection of the image forgery on the Quran images. Two layers of embedding scheme on wavelet and spatial domain are introduced to enhance the sensitivity of fragile watermarking and defend the attacks. Discrete wavelet transforms are applied to decompose the host image into wavelet prior to embedding the watermark in the wavelet domain. The watermarked wavelet coefficient is inverted back to spatial domain then the least significant bits is utilized to hide another watermark. A chaotic map is utilized to blur the watermark to make it secure against the local attack. The proposed method allows high watermark payloads, while preserving good image quality. Experiment results confirm that the proposed methods are fragile and have superior tampering detection even though the tampered area is very small. PMID:25028681

Two-layer fragile watermarking method secured with chaotic map for authentication of digital Holy Quran.

PubMed

Khalil, Mohammed S; Kurniawan, Fajri; Khan, Muhammad Khurram; Alginahi, Yasser M

2014-01-01

This paper presents a novel watermarking method to facilitate the authentication and detection of the image forgery on the Quran images. Two layers of embedding scheme on wavelet and spatial domain are introduced to enhance the sensitivity of fragile watermarking and defend the attacks. Discrete wavelet transforms are applied to decompose the host image into wavelet prior to embedding the watermark in the wavelet domain. The watermarked wavelet coefficient is inverted back to spatial domain then the least significant bits is utilized to hide another watermark. A chaotic map is utilized to blur the watermark to make it secure against the local attack. The proposed method allows high watermark payloads, while preserving good image quality. Experiment results confirm that the proposed methods are fragile and have superior tampering detection even though the tampered area is very small.

Non-integer expansion embedding techniques for reversible image watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xiang, Shijun; Wang, Yi

2015-12-01

This work aims at reducing the embedding distortion of prediction-error expansion (PE)-based reversible watermarking. In the classical PE embedding method proposed by Thodi and Rodriguez, the predicted value is rounded to integer number for integer prediction-error expansion (IPE) embedding. The rounding operation makes a constraint on a predictor's performance. In this paper, we propose a non-integer PE (NIPE) embedding approach, which can proceed non-integer prediction errors for embedding data into an audio or image file by only expanding integer element of a prediction error while keeping its fractional element unchanged. The advantage of the NIPE embedding technique is that the NIPE technique can really bring a predictor into full play by estimating a sample/pixel in a noncausal way in a single pass since there is no rounding operation. A new noncausal image prediction method to estimate a pixel with four immediate pixels in a single pass is included in the proposed scheme. The proposed noncausal image predictor can provide better performance than Sachnev et al.'s noncausal double-set prediction method (where data prediction in two passes brings a distortion problem due to the fact that half of the pixels were predicted with the watermarked pixels). In comparison with existing several state-of-the-art works, experimental results have shown that the NIPE technique with the new noncausal prediction strategy can reduce the embedding distortion for the same embedding payload.

Digital audio watermarking using moment-preserving thresholding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Choi, DooSeop; Jung, Hae Kyung; Choi, Hyuk; Kim, Taejeong

2007-09-01

The Moment-Preserving Thresholding technique for digital images has been used in digital image processing for decades, especially in image binarization and image compression. Its main strength lies in that the binary values that the MPT produces as a result, called representative values, are usually unaffected when the signal being thresholded goes through a signal processing operation. The two representative values in MPT together with the threshold value are obtained by solving the system of the preservation equations for the first, second, and third moment. Relying on this robustness of the representative values to various signal processing attacks considered in the watermarking context, this paper proposes a new watermarking scheme for audio signals. The watermark is embedded in the root-sum-square (RSS) of the two representative values of each signal block using the quantization technique. As a result, the RSS values are modified by scaling the signal according to the watermark bit sequence under the constraint of inaudibility relative to the human psycho-acoustic model. We also address and suggest solutions to the problem of synchronization and power scaling attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme maintains high audio quality and robustness to various attacks including MP3 compression, re-sampling, jittering, and, DA/AD conversion.

A blind reversible robust watermarking scheme for relational databases.

PubMed

Chang, Chin-Chen; Nguyen, Thai-Son; Lin, Chia-Chen

2013-01-01

Protecting the ownership and controlling the copies of digital data have become very important issues in Internet-based applications. Reversible watermark technology allows the distortion-free recovery of relational databases after the embedded watermark data are detected or verified. In this paper, we propose a new, blind, reversible, robust watermarking scheme that can be used to provide proof of ownership for the owner of a relational database. In the proposed scheme, a reversible data-embedding algorithm, which is referred to as "histogram shifting of adjacent pixel difference" (APD), is used to obtain reversibility. The proposed scheme can detect successfully 100% of the embedded watermark data, even if as much as 80% of the watermarked relational database is altered. Our extensive analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against a variety of data attacks, for example, alteration attacks, deletion attacks, mix-match attacks, and sorting attacks.

Digital watermarking opportunities enabled by mobile media proliferation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Modro, Sierra; Sharma, Ravi K.

2009-02-01

Consumer usages of mobile devices and electronic media are changing. Mobile devices now include increased computational capabilities, mobile broadband access, better integrated sensors, and higher resolution screens. These enhanced features are driving increased consumption of media such as images, maps, e-books, audio, video, and games. As users become more accustomed to using mobile devices for media, opportunities arise for new digital watermarking usage models. For example, transient media, like images being displayed on screens, could be watermarked to provide a link between mobile devices. Applications based on these emerging usage models utilizing watermarking can provide richer user experiences and drive increased media consumption. We describe the enabling factors and highlight a few of the usage models and new opportunities. We also outline how the new opportunities are driving further innovation in watermarking technologies. We discuss challenges in market adoption of applications based on these usage models.

A Blind Reversible Robust Watermarking Scheme for Relational Databases

PubMed Central

Chang, Chin-Chen; Nguyen, Thai-Son; Lin, Chia-Chen

2013-01-01

Protecting the ownership and controlling the copies of digital data have become very important issues in Internet-based applications. Reversible watermark technology allows the distortion-free recovery of relational databases after the embedded watermark data are detected or verified. In this paper, we propose a new, blind, reversible, robust watermarking scheme that can be used to provide proof of ownership for the owner of a relational database. In the proposed scheme, a reversible data-embedding algorithm, which is referred to as “histogram shifting of adjacent pixel difference” (APD), is used to obtain reversibility. The proposed scheme can detect successfully 100% of the embedded watermark data, even if as much as 80% of the watermarked relational database is altered. Our extensive analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against a variety of data attacks, for example, alteration attacks, deletion attacks, mix-match attacks, and sorting attacks. PMID:24223033

Discrete cosine transform and hash functions toward implementing a (robust-fragile) watermarking scheme

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Al-Mansoori, Saeed; Kunhu, Alavi

2013-10-01

This paper proposes a blind multi-watermarking scheme based on designing two back-to-back encoders. The first encoder is implemented to embed a robust watermark into remote sensing imagery by applying a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) approach. Such watermark is used in many applications to protect the copyright of the image. However, the second encoder embeds a fragile watermark using `SHA-1' hash function. The purpose behind embedding a fragile watermark is to prove the authenticity of the image (i.e. tamper-proof). Thus, the proposed technique was developed as a result of new challenges with piracy of remote sensing imagery ownership. This led researchers to look for different means to secure the ownership of satellite imagery and prevent the illegal use of these resources. Therefore, Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) proposed utilizing existing data security concept by embedding a digital signature, "watermark", into DubaiSat-1 satellite imagery. In this study, DubaiSat-1 images with 2.5 meter resolution are used as a cover and a colored EIAST logo is used as a watermark. In order to evaluate the robustness of the proposed technique, a couple of attacks are applied such as JPEG compression, rotation and synchronization attacks. Furthermore, tampering attacks are applied to prove image authenticity.

An Efficient Semi-fragile Watermarking Scheme for Tamper Localization and Recovery

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hou, Xiang; Yang, Hui; Min, Lianquan

2018-03-01

To solve the problem that remote sensing images are vulnerable to be tampered, a semi-fragile watermarking scheme was proposed. Binary random matrix was used as the authentication watermark, which was embedded by quantizing the maximum absolute value of directional sub-bands coefficients. The average gray level of every non-overlapping 4×4 block was adopted as the recovery watermark, which was embedded in the least significant bit. Watermarking detection could be done directly without resorting to the original images. Experimental results showed our method was robust against rational distortions to a certain extent. At the same time, it was fragile to malicious manipulation, and realized accurate localization and approximate recovery of the tampered regions. Therefore, this scheme can protect the security of remote sensing image effectively.

Secure smart grid communications and information integration based on digital watermarking in wireless sensor networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yan, Xin; Zhang, Ling; Wu, Yang; Luo, Youlong; Zhang, Xiaoxing

2017-02-01

As more and more wireless sensor nodes and networks are employed to acquire and transmit the state information of power equipment in smart grid, we are in urgent need of some viable security solutions to ensure secure smart grid communications. Conventional information security solutions, such as encryption/decryption, digital signature and so forth, are not applicable to wireless sensor networks in smart grid any longer, where bulk messages need to be exchanged continuously. The reason is that these cryptographic solutions will account for a large portion of the extremely limited resources on sensor nodes. In this article, a security solution based on digital watermarking is adopted to achieve the secure communications for wireless sensor networks in smart grid by data and entity authentications at a low cost of operation. Our solution consists of a secure framework of digital watermarking, and two digital watermarking algorithms based on alternating electric current and time window, respectively. Both watermarking algorithms are composed of watermark generation, embedding and detection. The simulation experiments are provided to verify the correctness and practicability of our watermarking algorithms. Additionally, a new cloud-based architecture for the information integration of smart grid is proposed on the basis of our security solutions.

An optical watermarking solution for color personal identification pictures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tan, Yi-zhou; Liu, Hai-bo; Huang, Shui-hua; Sheng, Ben-jian; Pan, Zhong-ming

2009-11-01

This paper presents a new approach for embedding authentication information into image on printed materials based on optical projection technique. Our experimental setup consists of two parts, one is a common camera, and the other is a LCD projector, which project a pattern on personnel's body (especially on the face). The pattern, generated by a computer, act as the illumination light source with sinusoidal distribution and it is also the watermark signal. For a color image, the watermark is embedded into the blue channel. While we take pictures (256×256 and 512×512, 567×390 pixels, respectively), an invisible mark is embedded directly into magnitude coefficients of Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) at exposure moment. Both optical and digital correlation is suitable for detection of this type of watermark. The decoded watermark is a set of concentric circles or sectors in the DFT domain (middle frequencies region) which is robust to photographing, printing and scanning. The unlawful people modify or replace the original photograph, and make fake passport (drivers' license and so on). Experiments show, it is difficult to forge certificates in which a watermark was embedded by our projector-camera combination based on analogue watermark method rather than classical digital method.

Locally optimum nonlinearities for DCT watermark detection.

PubMed

Briassouli, Alexia; Strintzis, Michael G

2004-12-01

The issue of copyright protection of digital multimedia data has attracted a lot of attention during the last decade. An efficient copyright protection method that has been gaining popularity is watermarking, i.e., the embedding of a signature in a digital document that can be detected only by its rightful owner. Watermarks are usually blindly detected using correlating structures, which would be optimal in the case of Gaussian data. However, in the case of DCT-domain image watermarking, the data is more heavy-tailed and the correlator is clearly suboptimal. Nonlinear receivers have been shown to be particularly well suited for the detection of weak signals in heavy-tailed noise, as they are locally optimal. This motivates the use of the Gaussian-tailed zero-memory nonlinearity, as well as the locally optimal Cauchy nonlinearity for the detection of watermarks in DCT transformed images. We analyze the performance of these schemes theoretically and compare it to that of the traditionally used Gaussian correlator, but also to the recently proposed generalized Gaussian detector, which outperforms the correlator. The theoretical analysis and the actual performance of these systems is assessed through experiments, which verify the theoretical analysis and also justify the use of nonlinear structures for watermark detection. The performance of the correlator and the nonlinear detectors in the presence of quantization is also analyzed, using results from dither theory, and also verified experimentally.

A source-channel coding approach to digital image protection and self-recovery.

PubMed

Sarreshtedari, Saeed; Akhaee, Mohammad Ali

2015-07-01

Watermarking algorithms have been widely applied to the field of image forensics recently. One of these very forensic applications is the protection of images against tampering. For this purpose, we need to design a watermarking algorithm fulfilling two purposes in case of image tampering: 1) detecting the tampered area of the received image and 2) recovering the lost information in the tampered zones. State-of-the-art techniques accomplish these tasks using watermarks consisting of check bits and reference bits. Check bits are used for tampering detection, whereas reference bits carry information about the whole image. The problem of recovering the lost reference bits still stands. This paper is aimed at showing that having the tampering location known, image tampering can be modeled and dealt with as an erasure error. Therefore, an appropriate design of channel code can protect the reference bits against tampering. In the present proposed method, the total watermark bit-budget is dedicated to three groups: 1) source encoder output bits; 2) channel code parity bits; and 3) check bits. In watermark embedding phase, the original image is source coded and the output bit stream is protected using appropriate channel encoder. For image recovery, erasure locations detected by check bits help channel erasure decoder to retrieve the original source encoded image. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms recent techniques in terms of image quality for both watermarked and recovered image. The watermarked image quality gain is achieved through spending less bit-budget on watermark, while image recovery quality is considerably improved as a consequence of consistent performance of designed source and channel codes.

JP3D compressed-domain watermarking of volumetric medical data sets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ouled Zaid, Azza; Makhloufi, Achraf; Olivier, Christian

2010-01-01

Increasing transmission of medical data across multiple user systems raises concerns for medical image watermarking. Additionaly, the use of volumetric images triggers the need for efficient compression techniques in picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), or telemedicine applications. This paper describes an hybrid data hiding/compression system, adapted to volumetric medical imaging. The central contribution is to integrate blind watermarking, based on turbo trellis-coded quantization (TCQ), to JP3D encoder. Results of our method applied to Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Computed Tomography (CT) medical images have shown that our watermarking scheme is robust to JP3D compression attacks and can provide relative high data embedding rate whereas keep a relative lower distortion.

Copyright protection of remote sensing imagery by means of digital watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barni, Mauro; Bartolini, Franco; Cappellini, Vito; Magli, Enrico; Olmo, Gabriella; Zanini, R.

2001-12-01

The demand for remote sensing data has increased dramatically mainly due to the large number of possible applications capable to exploit remotely sensed data and images. As in many other fields, along with the increase of market potential and product diffusion, the need arises for some sort of protection of the image products from unauthorized use. Such a need is a very crucial one even because the Internet and other public/private networks have become preferred and effective means of data exchange. An important issue arising when dealing with digital image distribution is copyright protection. Such a problem has been largely addressed by resorting to watermarking technology. Before applying watermarking techniques developed for multimedia applications to remote sensing applications, it is important that the requirements imposed by remote sensing imagery are carefully analyzed to investigate whether they are compatible with existing watermarking techniques. On the basis of these motivations, the contribution of this work is twofold: (1) assessment of the requirements imposed by the characteristics of remotely sensed images on watermark-based copyright protection; (2) discussion of a case study where the performance of two popular, state-of-the-art watermarking techniques are evaluated by the light of the requirements at the previous point.

Forensic Analysis of Digital Image Tampering

DTIC Science & Technology

2004-12-01

analysis of when each method fails, which Chapter 4 discusses. Finally, a test image containing an invisible watermark using LSB steganography is...2.2 – Example of invisible watermark using Steganography Software F5 ............. 8 Figure 2.3 – Example of copy-move image forgery [12...Figure 3.11 – Algorithm for JPEG Block Technique ....................................................... 54 Figure 3.12 – “Forged” Image with Result

Lossless Data Embedding—New Paradigm in Digital Watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fridrich, Jessica; Goljan, Miroslav; Du, Rui

2002-12-01

One common drawback of virtually all current data embedding methods is the fact that the original image is inevitably distorted due to data embedding itself. This distortion typically cannot be removed completely due to quantization, bit-replacement, or truncation at the grayscales 0 and 255. Although the distortion is often quite small and perceptual models are used to minimize its visibility, the distortion may not be acceptable for medical imagery (for legal reasons) or for military images inspected under nonstandard viewing conditions (after enhancement or extreme zoom). In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm for data embedding in images (lossless data embedding) that has the property that the distortion due to embedding can be completely removed from the watermarked image after the embedded data has been extracted. We present lossless embedding methods for the uncompressed formats (BMP, TIFF) and for the JPEG format. We also show how the concept of lossless data embedding can be used as a powerful tool to achieve a variety of nontrivial tasks, including lossless authentication using fragile watermarks, steganalysis of LSB embedding, and distortion-free robust watermarking.

Dual watermarking scheme for secure buyer-seller watermarking protocol

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mehra, Neelesh; Shandilya, Madhu

2012-04-01

A buyer-seller watermarking protocol utilize watermarking along with cryptography for copyright and copy protection for the seller and meanwhile it also preserve buyers rights for privacy. It enables a seller to successfully identify a malicious seller from a pirated copy, while preventing the seller from framing an innocent buyer and provide anonymity to buyer. Up to now many buyer-seller watermarking protocols have been proposed which utilize more and more cryptographic scheme to solve many common problems such as customer's rights, unbinding problem, buyer's anonymity problem and buyer's participation in the dispute resolution. But most of them are infeasible since the buyer may not have knowledge of cryptography. Another issue is the number of steps to complete the protocols are large, a buyer needs to interact with different parties many times in these protocols, which is very inconvenient for buyer. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper we proposed dual watermarking scheme in encrypted domain. Since neither of watermark has been generated by buyer so a general layman buyer can use the protocol.

Optimized selection of benchmark test parameters for image watermark algorithms based on Taguchi methods and corresponding influence on design decisions for real-world applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rodriguez, Tony F.; Cushman, David A.

2003-06-01

With the growing commercialization of watermarking techniques in various application scenarios it has become increasingly important to quantify the performance of watermarking products. The quantification of relative merits of various products is not only essential in enabling further adoption of the technology by society as a whole, but will also drive the industry to develop testing plans/methodologies to ensure quality and minimize cost (to both vendors & customers.) While the research community understands the theoretical need for a publicly available benchmarking system to quantify performance, there has been less discussion on the practical application of these systems. By providing a standard set of acceptance criteria, benchmarking systems can dramatically increase the quality of a particular watermarking solution, validating the product performances if they are used efficiently and frequently during the design process. In this paper we describe how to leverage specific design of experiments techniques to increase the quality of a watermarking scheme, to be used with the benchmark tools being developed by the Ad-Hoc Watermark Verification Group. A Taguchi Loss Function is proposed for an application and orthogonal arrays used to isolate optimal levels for a multi-factor experimental situation. Finally, the results are generalized to a population of cover works and validated through an exhaustive test.

Collusion issue in video watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Doerr, Gwenael; Dugelay, Jean-Luc

2005-03-01

Digital watermarking has first been introduced as a possible way to ensure intellectual property (IP) protection. However, fifteen years after its infancy, it is still viewed as a young technology and digital watermarking is far from being introduced in Digital Right Management (DRM) frameworks. A possible explanation is that the research community has so far mainly focused on the robustness of the embedded watermark and has almost ignored security aspects. For IP protection applications such as fingerprinting and copyright protection, the watermark should provide means to ensure some kind of trust in a non secure environment. To this end, security against attacks from malicious users has to be considered. This paper will focus on collusion attacks to evaluate security in the context of video watermarking. In particular, security pitfalls will be exhibited when frame-by-frame embedding strategies are enforced for video watermarking. Two alternative strategies will be surveyed: either eavesdropping the watermarking channel to identify some redundant hidden structure, or jamming the watermarking channel to wash out the embedded watermark signal. Finally, the need for a new brand of watermarking schemes will be highlighted if the watermark is to be released in a hostile environment, which is typically the case for IP protection applications.

Embedding multiple watermarks in the DFT domain using low- and high-frequency bands

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ganic, Emir; Dexter, Scott D.; Eskicioglu, Ahmet M.

2005-03-01

Although semi-blind and blind watermarking schemes based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) or Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are robust to a number of attacks, they fail in the presence of geometric attacks such as rotation, scaling, and translation. The Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of a real image is conjugate symmetric, resulting in a symmetric DFT spectrum. Because of this property, the popularity of DFT-based watermarking has increased in the last few years. In a recent paper, we generalized a circular watermarking idea to embed multiple watermarks in lower and higher frequencies. Nevertheless, a circular watermark is visible in the DFT domain, providing a potential hacker with valuable information about the location of the watermark. In this paper, our focus is on embedding multiple watermarks that are not visible in the DFT domain. Using several frequency bands increases the overall robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme. Specifically, our experiments show that the watermark embedded in lower frequencies is robust to one set of attacks, and the watermark embedded in higher frequencies is robust to a different set of attacks.

High capacity reversible watermarking for audio by histogram shifting and predicted error expansion.

PubMed

Wang, Fei; Xie, Zhaoxin; Chen, Zuo

2014-01-01

Being reversible, the watermarking information embedded in audio signals can be extracted while the original audio data can achieve lossless recovery. Currently, the few reversible audio watermarking algorithms are confronted with following problems: relatively low SNR (signal-to-noise) of embedded audio; a large amount of auxiliary embedded location information; and the absence of accurate capacity control capability. In this paper, we present a novel reversible audio watermarking scheme based on improved prediction error expansion and histogram shifting. First, we use differential evolution algorithm to optimize prediction coefficients and then apply prediction error expansion to output stego data. Second, in order to reduce location map bits length, we introduced histogram shifting scheme. Meanwhile, the prediction error modification threshold according to a given embedding capacity can be computed by our proposed scheme. Experiments show that this algorithm improves the SNR of embedded audio signals and embedding capacity, drastically reduces location map bits length, and enhances capacity control capability.

Watermark Estimation through Detector Observations

DTIC Science & Technology

1998-03-01

electronic watermark detection is only feasible if the watermark detector is aware of the secret K. In many watermarking business scenarios the watermark...detector will be available to the public as a black box D. The following question is therefore justified: Can the secret K be deduced from the

Design Time Optimization for Hardware Watermarking Protection of HDL Designs

PubMed Central

Castillo, E.; Morales, D. P.; García, A.; Parrilla, L.; Todorovich, E.; Meyer-Baese, U.

2015-01-01

HDL-level design offers important advantages for the application of watermarking to IP cores, but its complexity also requires tools automating these watermarking algorithms. A new tool for signature distribution through combinational logic is proposed in this work. IPP@HDL, a previously proposed high-level watermarking technique, has been employed for evaluating the tool. IPP@HDL relies on spreading the bits of a digital signature at the HDL design level using combinational logic included within the original system. The development of this new tool for the signature distribution has not only extended and eased the applicability of this IPP technique, but it has also improved the signature hosting process itself. Three algorithms were studied in order to develop this automated tool. The selection of a cost function determines the best hosting solutions in terms of area and performance penalties on the IP core to protect. An 1D-DWT core and MD5 and SHA1 digital signatures were used in order to illustrate the benefits of the new tool and its optimization related to the extraction logic resources. Among the proposed algorithms, the alternative based on simulated annealing reduces the additional resources while maintaining an acceptable computation time and also saving designer effort and time. PMID:25861681

Protection of Health Imagery by Region Based Lossless Reversible Watermarking Scheme

PubMed Central

Priya, R. Lakshmi; Sadasivam, V.

2015-01-01

Providing authentication and integrity in medical images is a problem and this work proposes a new blind fragile region based lossless reversible watermarking technique to improve trustworthiness of medical images. The proposed technique embeds the watermark using a reversible least significant bit embedding scheme. The scheme combines hashing, compression, and digital signature techniques to create a content dependent watermark making use of compressed region of interest (ROI) for recovery of ROI as reported in literature. The experiments were carried out to prove the performance of the scheme and its assessment reveals that ROI is extracted in an intact manner and PSNR values obtained lead to realization that the presented scheme offers greater protection for health imageries. PMID:26649328

Discriminative and robust zero-watermarking scheme based on completed local binary pattern for authentication and copyright identification of medical images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Xiyao; Lou, Jieting; Wang, Yifan; Du, Jingyu; Zou, Beiji; Chen, Yan

2018-03-01

Authentication and copyright identification are two critical security issues for medical images. Although zerowatermarking schemes can provide durable, reliable and distortion-free protection for medical images, the existing zerowatermarking schemes for medical images still face two problems. On one hand, they rarely considered the distinguishability for medical images, which is critical because different medical images are sometimes similar to each other. On the other hand, their robustness against geometric attacks, such as cropping, rotation and flipping, is insufficient. In this study, a novel discriminative and robust zero-watermarking (DRZW) is proposed to address these two problems. In DRZW, content-based features of medical images are first extracted based on completed local binary pattern (CLBP) operator to ensure the distinguishability and robustness, especially against geometric attacks. Then, master shares and ownership shares are generated from the content-based features and watermark according to (2,2) visual cryptography. Finally, the ownership shares are stored for authentication and copyright identification. For queried medical images, their content-based features are extracted and master shares are generated. Their watermarks for authentication and copyright identification are recovered by stacking the generated master shares and stored ownership shares. 200 different medical images of 5 types are collected as the testing data and our experimental results demonstrate that DRZW ensures both the accuracy and reliability of authentication and copyright identification. When fixing the false positive rate to 1.00%, the average value of false negative rates by using DRZW is only 1.75% under 20 common attacks with different parameters.

Gamma watermarking

DOEpatents

Ishikawa, Muriel Y.; Wood, Lowell L.; Lougheed, Ronald W.; Moody, Kenton J.; Wang, Tzu-Fang

2004-05-25

A covert, gamma-ray "signature" is used as a "watermark" for property identification. This new watermarking technology is based on a unique steganographic or "hidden writing" digital signature, implemented in tiny quantities of gamma-ray-emitting radioisotopic material combinations, generally covertly emplaced on or within an object. This digital signature may be readily recovered at distant future times, by placing a sensitive, high energy-resolution gamma-ray detecting instrument reasonably precisely over the location of the watermark, which location may be known only to the object's owner; however, the signature is concealed from all ordinary detection means because its exceedingly low level of activity is obscured by the natural radiation background (including the gamma radiation naturally emanating from the object itself, from cosmic radiation and material surroundings, from human bodies, etc.). The "watermark" is used in object-tagging for establishing object identity, history or ownership. It thus may serve as an aid to law enforcement officials in identifying stolen property and prosecuting theft thereof. Highly effective, potentially very low cost identification-on demand of items of most all types is thus made possible.

Buyer-seller watermarking protocol based on amplitude modulation and the El Gamal Public Key Crypto System

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Memon, Nasir D.; Wong, Ping W.

1999-04-01

Digital watermarks have recently been proposed for the purposes of copy protection and copy deterrence for multimedia content. In copy deterrence, a content owner (seller) inserts a unique watermark into a copy of the content before it is sold to a buyer. If the buyer resells unauthorized copies of the watermarked content, then these copies can be traced to the unlawful reseller (original buyer) using a watermark detection algorithm. One problem with such an approach is that the original buyer whose watermark has been found on unauthorized copies can claim that the unauthorized copy was created or caused (for example, by a security breach) by the original seller. In this paper we propose an interactive buyer-seller protocol for invisible watermarking in which the seller does not get to know the exact watermarked copy that the buyer receives. Hence the seller cannot create copies of the original content containing the buyer's watermark. In cases where the seller finds an unauthorized copy, the seller can identify the buyer from a watermark in the unauthorized copy, and furthermore the seller can prove this fact to a third party using a dispute resolution protocol. This prevents the buyer from claiming that an unauthorized copy may have originated from the seller.

A compressive sensing based secure watermark detection and privacy preserving storage framework.

PubMed

Qia Wang; Wenjun Zeng; Jun Tian

2014-03-01

Privacy is a critical issue when the data owners outsource data storage or processing to a third party computing service, such as the cloud. In this paper, we identify a cloud computing application scenario that requires simultaneously performing secure watermark detection and privacy preserving multimedia data storage. We then propose a compressive sensing (CS)-based framework using secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols to address such a requirement. In our framework, the multimedia data and secret watermark pattern are presented to the cloud for secure watermark detection in a CS domain to protect the privacy. During CS transformation, the privacy of the CS matrix and the watermark pattern is protected by the MPC protocols under the semi-honest security model. We derive the expected watermark detection performance in the CS domain, given the target image, watermark pattern, and the size of the CS matrix (but without the CS matrix itself). The correctness of the derived performance has been validated by our experiments. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results show that secure watermark detection in the CS domain is feasible. Our framework can also be extended to other collaborative secure signal processing and data-mining applications in the cloud.

On digital cinema and watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

van Leest, Arno; Haitsma, Jaap; Kalker, Ton

2003-06-01

The illegal copying of movies in the cinema is now common practice. Although the quality is fairly low, the economic impact of these illegal copies can be enormous. Philips' digital cinema watermarking scheme is designed for the upcoming digital cinema format and will assist content owners and distributors with tracing the origin of illegal copies. In this paper we consider this watermarking scheme in more detail. A characteristic of this watermarking scheme is that it only exploits the temporal axis to insert a watermark. It is therefore inherently robust to geometrical distortions, a necessity for surviving illegal copying by camcorder recording. Moreover, the scheme resists frame rate conversions resulting from a frame rate mismatch between the camcorder and the projector. The watermarking scheme has been tested in a 'real' digital cinema environment with good results.

Registration methods for nonblind watermark detection in digital cinema applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nguyen, Philippe; Balter, Raphaele; Montfort, Nicolas; Baudry, Severine

2003-06-01

Digital watermarking may be used to enforce copyright protection of digital cinema, by embedding in each projected movie an unique identifier (fingerprint). By identifying the source of illegal copies, watermarking will thus incite movie theatre managers to enforce copyright protection, in particular by preventing people from coming in with a handy cam. We propose here a non-blind watermark method to improve the watermark detection on very impaired sequences. We first present a study on the picture impairments caused by the projection on a screen, then acquisition with a handy cam. We show that images undergo geometric deformations, which are fully described by a projective geometry model. The sequence also undergoes spatial and temporal luminance variation. Based on this study and on the impairments models which follow, we propose a method to match the retrieved sequence to the original one. First, temporal registration is performed by comparing the average luminance variation on both sequences. To compensate for geometric transformations, we used paired points from both sequences, obtained by applying a feature points detector. The matching of the feature points then enables to retrieve the geometric transform parameters. Tests show that the watermark retrieval on rectified sequences is greatly improved.

Design and evaluation of sparse quantization index modulation watermarking schemes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cornelis, Bruno; Barbarien, Joeri; Dooms, Ann; Munteanu, Adrian; Cornelis, Jan; Schelkens, Peter

2008-08-01

In the past decade the use of digital data has increased significantly. The advantages of digital data are, amongst others, easy editing, fast, cheap and cross-platform distribution and compact storage. The most crucial disadvantages are the unauthorized copying and copyright issues, by which authors and license holders can suffer considerable financial losses. Many inexpensive methods are readily available for editing digital data and, unlike analog information, the reproduction in the digital case is simple and robust. Hence, there is great interest in developing technology that helps to protect the integrity of a digital work and the copyrights of its owners. Watermarking, which is the embedding of a signal (known as the watermark) into the original digital data, is one method that has been proposed for the protection of digital media elements such as audio, video and images. In this article, we examine watermarking schemes for still images, based on selective quantization of the coefficients of a wavelet transformed image, i.e. sparse quantization-index modulation (QIM) watermarking. Different grouping schemes for the wavelet coefficients are evaluated and experimentally verified for robustness against several attacks. Wavelet tree-based grouping schemes yield a slightly improved performance over block-based grouping schemes. Additionally, the impact of the deployment of error correction codes on the most promising configurations is examined. The utilization of BCH-codes (Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri, Hocquenghem) results in an improved robustness as long as the capacity of the error codes is not exceeded (cliff-effect).

Medical image integrity control and forensics based on watermarking--approximating local modifications and identifying global image alterations.

PubMed

Huang, H; Coatrieux, G; Shu, H Z; Luo, L M; Roux, Ch

2011-01-01

In this paper we present a medical image integrity verification system that not only allows detecting and approximating malevolent local image alterations (e.g. removal or addition of findings) but is also capable to identify the nature of global image processing applied to the image (e.g. lossy compression, filtering …). For that purpose, we propose an image signature derived from the geometric moments of pixel blocks. Such a signature is computed over regions of interest of the image and then watermarked in regions of non interest. Image integrity analysis is conducted by comparing embedded and recomputed signatures. If any, local modifications are approximated through the determination of the parameters of the nearest generalized 2D Gaussian. Image moments are taken as image features and serve as inputs to one classifier we learned to discriminate the type of global image processing. Experimental results with both local and global modifications illustrate the overall performances of our approach.

A text zero-watermarking method based on keyword dense interval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Fan; Zhu, Yuesheng; Jiang, Yifeng; Qing, Yin

2017-07-01

Digital watermarking has been recognized as a useful technology for the copyright protection and authentication of digital information. However, rarely did the former methods focus on the key content of digital carrier. The idea based on the protection of key content is more targeted and can be considered in different digital information, including text, image and video. In this paper, we use text as research object and a text zero-watermarking method which uses keyword dense interval (KDI) as the key content is proposed. First, we construct zero-watermarking model by introducing the concept of KDI and giving the method of KDI extraction. Second, we design detection model which includes secondary generation of zero-watermark and the similarity computing method of keyword distribution. Besides, experiments are carried out, and the results show that the proposed method gives better performance than other available methods especially in the attacks of sentence transformation and synonyms substitution.

Robust and Blind 3D Mesh Watermarking in Spatial Domain Based on Faces Categorization and Sorting

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Molaei, Amir Masoud; Ebrahimnezhad, Hossein; Sedaaghi, Mohammad Hossein

2016-06-01

In this paper, a 3D watermarking algorithm in spatial domain is presented with blind detection. In the proposed method, a negligible visual distortion is observed in host model. Initially, a preprocessing is applied on the 3D model to make it robust against geometric transformation attacks. Then, a number of triangle faces are determined as mark triangles using a novel systematic approach in which faces are categorized and sorted robustly. In order to enhance the capability of information retrieval by attacks, block watermarks are encoded using Reed-Solomon block error-correcting code before embedding into the mark triangles. Next, the encoded watermarks are embedded in spherical coordinates. The proposed method is robust against additive noise, mesh smoothing and quantization attacks. Also, it is stout next to geometric transformation, vertices and faces reordering attacks. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is designed so that it is robust against the cropping attack. Simulation results confirm that the watermarked models confront very low distortion if the control parameters are selected properly. Comparison with other methods demonstrates that the proposed method has good performance against the mesh smoothing attacks.

Replacement Attack: A New Zero Text Watermarking Attack

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bashardoost, Morteza; Mohd Rahim, Mohd Shafry; Saba, Tanzila; Rehman, Amjad

2017-03-01

The main objective of zero watermarking methods that are suggested for the authentication of textual properties is to increase the fragility of produced watermarks against tampering attacks. On the other hand, zero watermarking attacks intend to alter the contents of document without changing the watermark. In this paper, the Replacement attack is proposed, which focuses on maintaining the location of the words in the document. The proposed text watermarking attack is specifically effective on watermarking approaches that exploit words' transition in the document. The evaluation outcomes prove that tested word-based method are unable to detect the existence of replacement attack in the document. Moreover, the comparison results show that the size of Replacement attack is estimated less accurate than other common types of zero text watermarking attacks.

Security protection of DICOM medical images using dual-layer reversible watermarking with tamper detection capability.

PubMed

Tan, Chun Kiat; Ng, Jason Changwei; Xu, Xiaotian; Poh, Chueh Loo; Guan, Yong Liang; Sheah, Kenneth

2011-06-01

Teleradiology applications and universal availability of patient records using web-based technology are rapidly gaining importance. Consequently, digital medical image security has become an important issue when images and their pertinent patient information are transmitted across public networks, such as the Internet. Health mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act require healthcare providers to adhere to security measures in order to protect sensitive patient information. This paper presents a fully reversible, dual-layer watermarking scheme with tamper detection capability for medical images. The scheme utilizes concepts of public-key cryptography and reversible data-hiding technique. The scheme was tested using medical images in DICOM format. The results show that the scheme is able to ensure image authenticity and integrity, and to locate tampered regions in the images.

Robustness evaluation of transactional audio watermarking systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Neubauer, Christian; Steinebach, Martin; Siebenhaar, Frank; Pickel, Joerg

2003-06-01

Distribution via Internet is of increasing importance. Easy access, transmission and consumption of digitally represented music is very attractive to the consumer but led also directly to an increasing problem of illegal copying. To cope with this problem watermarking is a promising concept since it provides a useful mechanism to track illicit copies by persistently attaching property rights information to the material. Especially for online music distribution the use of so-called transaction watermarking, also denoted with the term bitstream watermarking, is beneficial since it offers the opportunity to embed watermarks directly into perceptually encoded material without the need of full decompression/compression. Besides the concept of bitstream watermarking, former publications presented the complexity, the audio quality and the detection performance. These results are now extended by an assessment of the robustness of such schemes. The detection performance before and after applying selected attacks is presented for MPEG-1/2 Layer 3 (MP3) and MPEG-2/4 AAC bitstream watermarking, contrasted to the performance of PCM spread spectrum watermarking.

Wavelet-based watermarking and compression for ECG signals with verification evaluation.

PubMed

Tseng, Kuo-Kun; He, Xialong; Kung, Woon-Man; Chen, Shuo-Tsung; Liao, Minghong; Huang, Huang-Nan

2014-02-21

In the current open society and with the growth of human rights, people are more and more concerned about the privacy of their information and other important data. This study makes use of electrocardiography (ECG) data in order to protect individual information. An ECG signal can not only be used to analyze disease, but also to provide crucial biometric information for identification and authentication. In this study, we propose a new idea of integrating electrocardiogram watermarking and compression approach, which has never been researched before. ECG watermarking can ensure the confidentiality and reliability of a user's data while reducing the amount of data. In the evaluation, we apply the embedding capacity, bit error rate (BER), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), compression ratio (CR), and compressed-signal to noise ratio (CNR) methods to assess the proposed algorithm. After comprehensive evaluation the final results show that our algorithm is robust and feasible.

Robust High-Capacity Audio Watermarking Based on FFT Amplitude Modification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fallahpour, Mehdi; Megías, David

This paper proposes a novel robust audio watermarking algorithm to embed data and extract it in a bit-exact manner based on changing the magnitudes of the FFT spectrum. The key point is selecting a frequency band for embedding based on the comparison between the original and the MP3 compressed/decompressed signal and on a suitable scaling factor. The experimental results show that the method has a very high capacity (about 5kbps), without significant perceptual distortion (ODG about -0.25) and provides robustness against common audio signal processing such as added noise, filtering and MPEG compression (MP3). Furthermore, the proposed method has a larger capacity (number of embedded bits to number of host bits rate) than recent image data hiding methods.

Selectively Encrypted Pull-Up Based Watermarking of Biometric data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shinde, S. A.; Patel, Kushal S.

2012-10-01

Biometric authentication systems are becoming increasingly popular due to their potential usage in information security. However, digital biometric data (e.g. thumb impression) are themselves vulnerable to security attacks. There are various methods are available to secure biometric data. In biometric watermarking the data are embedded in an image container and are only retrieved if the secrete key is available. This container image is encrypted to have more security against the attack. As wireless devices are equipped with battery as their power supply, they have limited computational capabilities; therefore to reduce energy consumption we use the method of selective encryption of container image. The bit pull-up-based biometric watermarking scheme is based on amplitude modulation and bit priority which reduces the retrieval error rate to great extent. By using selective Encryption mechanism we expect more efficiency in time at the time of encryption as well as decryption. Significant reduction in error rate is expected to be achieved by the bit pull-up method.

Drift-free MPEG-4 AVC semi-fragile watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hasnaoui, M.; Mitrea, M.

2014-02-01

While intra frame drifting is a concern for all types of MPEG-4 AVC compressed-domain video processing applications, it has a particular negative impact in watermarking. In order to avoid the drift drawbacks, two classes of solutions are currently considered in the literature. They try either to compensate the drift distortions at the expense of complex decoding/estimation algorithms or to restrict the insertion to the blocks which are not involved in the prediction, thus reducing the data payload. The present study follows a different approach. First, it algebraically models the drift distortion spread problem by considering the analytic expressions of the MPEG-4 AVC encoding operations. Secondly, it solves the underlying algebraic system under drift-free constraints. Finally, the advanced solution is adapted to take into account the watermarking peculiarities. The experiments consider an m-QIM semi-fragile watermarking method and a video surveillance corpus of 80 minutes. For prescribed data payload (100 bit/s), robustness (BER < 0.1 against transcoding at 50% in stream size), fragility (frame modification detection with accuracies of 1/81 from the frame size and 3s) and complexity constraints, the modified insertion results in gains in transparency of 2 dB in PSNR, of 0.4 in AAD, of 0.002 in IF, of 0.03 in SC, of 0.017 NCC and 22 in DVQ.

Robust Audio Watermarking by Using Low-Frequency Histogram

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xiang, Shijun

In continuation to earlier work where the problem of time-scale modification (TSM) has been studied [1] by modifying the shape of audio time domain histogram, here we consider the additional ingredient of resisting additive noise-like operations, such as Gaussian noise, lossy compression and low-pass filtering. In other words, we study the problem of the watermark against both TSM and additive noises. To this end, in this paper we extract the histogram from a Gaussian-filtered low-frequency component for audio watermarking. The watermark is inserted by shaping the histogram in a way that the use of two consecutive bins as a group is exploited for hiding a bit by reassigning their population. The watermarked signals are perceptibly similar to the original one. Comparing with the previous time-domain watermarking scheme [1], the proposed watermarking method is more robust against additive noise, MP3 compression, low-pass filtering, etc.

Information Hiding: an Annotated Bibliography

DTIC Science & Technology

1999-04-13

parameters needed for reconstruction are enciphered using DES . The encrypted image is hidden in a cover image . [153] 074115, ‘Watermarking algorithm ...authors present a block based watermarking algorithm for digital images . The D.C.T. of the block is increased by a certain value. Quality control is...includes evaluation of the watermark robustness and the subjec- tive visual image quality. Two algorithms use the frequency domain while the two others use

A robust H.264/AVC video watermarking scheme with drift compensation.

PubMed

Jiang, Xinghao; Sun, Tanfeng; Zhou, Yue; Wang, Wan; Shi, Yun-Qing

2014-01-01

A robust H.264/AVC video watermarking scheme for copyright protection with self-adaptive drift compensation is proposed. In our scheme, motion vector residuals of macroblocks with the smallest partition size are selected to hide copyright information in order to hold visual impact and distortion drift to a minimum. Drift compensation is also implemented to reduce the influence of watermark to the most extent. Besides, discrete cosine transform (DCT) with energy compact property is applied to the motion vector residual group, which can ensure robustness against intentional attacks. According to the experimental results, this scheme gains excellent imperceptibility and low bit-rate increase. Malicious attacks with different quantization parameters (QPs) or motion estimation algorithms can be resisted efficiently, with 80% accuracy on average after lossy compression.

Robust 3D DFT video watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Deguillaume, Frederic; Csurka, Gabriela; O'Ruanaidh, Joseph J.; Pun, Thierry

1999-04-01

This paper proposes a new approach for digital watermarking and secure copyright protection of videos, the principal aim being to discourage illicit copying and distribution of copyrighted material. The method presented here is based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of three dimensional chunks of video scene, in contrast with previous works on video watermarking where each video frame was marked separately, or where only intra-frame or motion compensation parameters were marked in MPEG compressed videos. Two kinds of information are hidden in the video: a watermark and a template. Both are encoded using an owner key to ensure the system security and are embedded in the 3D DFT magnitude of video chunks. The watermark is a copyright information encoded in the form of a spread spectrum signal. The template is a key based grid and is used to detect and invert the effect of frame-rate changes, aspect-ratio modification and rescaling of frames. The template search and matching is performed in the log-log-log map of the 3D DFT magnitude. The performance of the presented technique is evaluated experimentally and compared with a frame-by-frame 2D DFT watermarking approach.

Analyzing the effect of the distortion compensation in reversible watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Suah; Kim, Hyoung Joong

2014-01-01

Reversible watermarking is used to hide information in images for medical and military uses. Reversible watermarking in images using distortion compensation proposed by Vasily et al [5] embeds each pixel twice such that distortion caused by the first embedding is reduced or removed by the distortion introduced by the second embedding. In their paper, because it is not applied in its most basic form, it is not clear whether improving it can achieve better results than the existing state of the art techniques. In this paper we first provide a novel basic distortion compensation technique that uses same prediction method as Tian's [2] difference expansion method (DE), in order to measure the effect of the distortion compensation more accurately. In the second part, we will analyze what kind of improvements can be made in distortion compensation.

A New Image Encryption Technique Combining Hill Cipher Method, Morse Code and Least Significant Bit Algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nofriansyah, Dicky; Defit, Sarjon; Nurcahyo, Gunadi W.; Ganefri, G.; Ridwan, R.; Saleh Ahmar, Ansari; Rahim, Robbi

2018-01-01

Cybercrime is one of the most serious threats. Efforts are made to reduce the number of cybercrime is to find new techniques in securing data such as Cryptography, Steganography and Watermarking combination. Cryptography and Steganography is a growing data security science. A combination of Cryptography and Steganography is one effort to improve data integrity. New techniques are used by combining several algorithms, one of which is the incorporation of hill cipher method and Morse code. Morse code is one of the communication codes used in the Scouting field. This code consists of dots and lines. This is a new modern and classic concept to maintain data integrity. The result of the combination of these three methods is expected to generate new algorithms to improve the security of the data, especially images.

A Robust H.264/AVC Video Watermarking Scheme with Drift Compensation

PubMed Central

Sun, Tanfeng; Zhou, Yue; Shi, Yun-Qing

2014-01-01

A robust H.264/AVC video watermarking scheme for copyright protection with self-adaptive drift compensation is proposed. In our scheme, motion vector residuals of macroblocks with the smallest partition size are selected to hide copyright information in order to hold visual impact and distortion drift to a minimum. Drift compensation is also implemented to reduce the influence of watermark to the most extent. Besides, discrete cosine transform (DCT) with energy compact property is applied to the motion vector residual group, which can ensure robustness against intentional attacks. According to the experimental results, this scheme gains excellent imperceptibility and low bit-rate increase. Malicious attacks with different quantization parameters (QPs) or motion estimation algorithms can be resisted efficiently, with 80% accuracy on average after lossy compression. PMID:24672376

a Review of Digital Watermarking and Copyright Control Technology for Cultural Relics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, H.; Hou, M.; Hu, Y.

2018-04-01

With the rapid growth of the application and sharing of the 3-D model data in the protection of cultural relics, the problem of Shared security and copyright control of the three-dimensional model of cultural relics is becoming increasingly prominent. Followed by a digital watermarking copyright control has become the frontier technology of 3-D model security protection of cultural relics and effective means, related technology research and application in recent years also got further development. 3-D model based on cultural relics digital watermarking and copyright control technology, introduces the research background and demand, its unique characteristics were described, and its development and application of the algorithm are discussed, and the prospects of the future development trend and some problems and the solution.

Optimum decoding and detection of a multiplicative amplitude-encoded watermark

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barni, Mauro; Bartolini, Franco; De Rosa, Alessia; Piva, Alessandro

2002-04-01

The aim of this paper is to present a novel approach to the decoding and the detection of multibit, multiplicative, watermarks embedded in the frequency domain. Watermark payload is conveyed by amplitude modulating a pseudo-random sequence, thus resembling conventional DS spread spectrum techniques. As opposed to conventional communication systems, though, the watermark is embedded within the host DFT coefficients by using a multiplicative rule. The watermark decoding technique presented in the paper is an optimum one, in that it minimizes the bit error probability. The problem of watermark presence assessment, which is often underestimated by state-of-the-art research on multibit watermarking, is addressed too, and the optimum detection rule derived according to the Neyman-Pearson criterion. Experimental results are shown both to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical analysis and to highlight the good performance of the proposed system.

DWT-Based High Capacity Audio Watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fallahpour, Mehdi; Megías, David

This letter suggests a novel high capacity robust audio watermarking algorithm by using the high frequency band of the wavelet decomposition, for which the human auditory system (HAS) is not very sensitive to alteration. The main idea is to divide the high frequency band into frames and then, for embedding, the wavelet samples are changed based on the average of the relevant frame. The experimental results show that the method has very high capacity (about 5.5kbps), without significant perceptual distortion (ODG in [-1, 0] and SNR about 33dB) and provides robustness against common audio signal processing such as added noise, filtering, echo and MPEG compression (MP3).

Evidence of tampering in watermark identification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McLauchlan, Lifford; Mehrübeoglu, Mehrübe

2009-08-01

In this work, watermarks are embedded in digital images in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain. Principal component analysis (PCA) is performed on the DWT coefficients. Next higher order statistics based on the principal components and the eigenvalues are determined for different sets of images. Feature sets are analyzed for different types of attacks in m dimensional space. The results demonstrate the separability of the features for the tampered digital copies. Different feature sets are studied to determine more effective tamper evident feature sets. The digital forensics, the probable manipulation(s) or modification(s) performed on the digital information can be identified using the described technique.

Deterring watermark collusion attacks using signal processing techniques

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lemma, Aweke N.; van der Veen, Michiel

2007-02-01

Collusion attack is a malicious watermark removal attack in which the hacker has access to multiple copies of the same content with different watermarks and tries to remove the watermark using averaging. In the literature, several solutions to collusion attacks have been reported. The main stream solutions aim at designing watermark codes that are inherently resistant to collusion attacks. The other approaches propose signal processing based solutions that aim at modifying the watermarked signals in such a way that averaging multiple copies of the content leads to a significant degradation of the content quality. In this paper, we present signal processing based technique that may be deployed for deterring collusion attacks. We formulate the problem in the context of electronic music distribution where the content is generally available in the compressed domain. Thus, we first extend the collusion resistance principles to bit stream signals and secondly present experimental based analysis to estimate a bound on the maximum number of modified versions of a content that satisfy good perceptibility requirement on one hand and destructive averaging property on the other hand.

Privacy protection in surveillance systems based on JPEG DCT baseline compression and spectral domain watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sablik, Thomas; Velten, Jörg; Kummert, Anton

2015-03-01

An novel system for automatic privacy protection in digital media based on spectral domain watermarking and JPEG compression is described in the present paper. In a first step private areas are detected. Therefore a detection method is presented. The implemented method uses Haar cascades to detects faces. Integral images are used to speed up calculations and the detection. Multiple detections of one face are combined. Succeeding steps comprise embedding the data into the image as part of JPEG compression using spectral domain methods and protecting the area of privacy. The embedding process is integrated into and adapted to JPEG compression. A Spread Spectrum Watermarking method is used to embed the size and position of the private areas into the cover image. Different methods for embedding regarding their robustness are compared. Moreover the performance of the method concerning tampered images is presented.

Watermarking requirements for Boeing digital cinema

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lixvar, John P.

2003-06-01

The enormous economic incentives for safeguarding intellectual property in the digital domain have made forensic watermarking a research topic of considerable interest. However, a recent examination of some of the leading product development efforts reveals that at present there is no effective watermarking implementation that addresses both the fidelity and security requirements of high definition digital cinema. If Boeing Digital Cinema (BDC, a business unit of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems) is to succeed in using watermarking as a deterrent to the unauthorized capture and distribution of high value cinematic material, the technology must be robust, transparent, asymmetric in its insertion/detection costs, and compatible with all the other elements of Boeing's multi-layered security system, including its compression, encryption, and key management services.

Joint forensics and watermarking approach for video authentication

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Thiemert, Stefan; Liu, Huajian; Steinebach, Martin; Croce-Ferri, Lucilla

2007-02-01

In our paper we discuss and compare the possibilities and shortcomings of both content-fragile watermarking and digital forensics and analyze if the combination of both techniques allows the identification of more than the sum of all manipulations identified by both techniques on their own due to synergetic effects. The first part of the paper discusses the theoretical possibilities offered by a combined approach, in which forensics and watermarking are considered as complementary tools for data authentication or deeply combined together, in order to reduce their error rate and to enhance the detection efficiency. After this conceptual discussion the paper proposes some concrete examples in which the joint approach is applied to video authentication. Some specific forensics techniques are analyzed and expanded to handle efficiently video data. The examples show possible extensions of passive-blind image forgery detection to video data, where the motion and time related characteristics of video are efficiently exploited.

Individually Watermarked Information Distributed Scalable by Modified Transforms

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-10-01

inverse of the secret transform is needed. Each trusted recipient has a unique inverse transform that is similar to the inverse of the original...transform. The elements of this individual inverse transform are given by the individual descrambling key. After applying the individual inverse ... transform the retrieved image is embedded with a recipient individual watermark. Souce 1 I Decode IW1 Decode IW2 Decode ISC Scramb K Recipient 3

PrOtocols for WatERmarking (POWER)

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-03-01

22. Page 57 of 94 Figure 22: Exemplary watermark structure incl. the structure of the embedded ToC The segmented watermarking approach for...somewhere within the cover. The addresses addressSLji belonging to the different access levels Li are stored in a table of contents ( ToC ) entry, along...then embedded into the ToC -segment Stoc. Several assumptions have to be made before describing the actual functions of the presented system

Secure annotation for medical images based on reversible watermarking in the Integer Fibonacci-Haar transform domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Battisti, F.; Carli, M.; Neri, A.

2011-03-01

The increasing use of digital image-based applications is resulting in huge databases that are often difficult to use and prone to misuse and privacy concerns. These issues are especially crucial in medical applications. The most commonly adopted solution is the encryption of both the image and the patient data in separate files that are then linked. This practice results to be inefficient since, in order to retrieve patient data or analysis details, it is necessary to decrypt both files. In this contribution, an alternative solution for secure medical image annotation is presented. The proposed framework is based on the joint use of a key-dependent wavelet transform, the Integer Fibonacci-Haar transform, of a secure cryptographic scheme, and of a reversible watermarking scheme. The system allows: i) the insertion of the patient data into the encrypted image without requiring the knowledge of the original image, ii) the encryption of annotated images without causing loss in the embedded information, and iii) due to the complete reversibility of the process, it allows recovering the original image after the mark removal. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Light Weight MP3 Watermarking Method for Mobile Terminals

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Takagi, Koichi; Sakazawa, Shigeyuki; Takishima, Yasuhiro

This paper proposes a novel MP3 watermarking method which is applicable to a mobile terminal with limited computational resources. Considering that in most cases the embedded information is copyright information or metadata, which should be extracted before playing back audio contents, the watermark detection process should be executed at high speed. However, when conventional methods are used with a mobile terminal, it takes a considerable amount of time to detect a digital watermark. This paper focuses on scalefactor manipulation to enable high speed watermark embedding/detection for MP3 audio and also proposes the manipulation method which minimizes audio quality degradation adaptively. Evaluation tests showed that the proposed method is capable of embedding 3 bits/frame information without degrading audio quality and detecting it at very high speed. Finally, this paper describes application examples for authentication with a digital signature.

A New Quantum Watermarking Based on Quantum Wavelet Transforms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Heidari, Shahrokh; Naseri, Mosayeb; Gheibi, Reza; Baghfalaki, Masoud; Rasoul Pourarian, Mohammad; Farouk, Ahmed

2017-06-01

Quantum watermarking is a technique to embed specific information, usually the owner’s identification, into quantum cover data such for copyright protection purposes. In this paper, a new scheme for quantum watermarking based on quantum wavelet transforms is proposed which includes scrambling, embedding and extracting procedures. The invisibility and robustness performances of the proposed watermarking method is confirmed by simulation technique. The invisibility of the scheme is examined by the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the histogram calculation. Furthermore the robustness of the scheme is analyzed by the Bit Error Rate (BER) and the Correlation Two-Dimensional (Corr 2-D) calculation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed watermarking scheme indicate not only acceptable visual quality but also a good resistance against different types of attack. Supported by Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran

Data Hiding and the Statistics of Images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cox, Ingemar J.

The fields of digital watermarking, steganography and steganalysis, and content forensics are closely related. In all cases, there is a class of images that is considered “natural”, i.e. images that do not contain watermarks, images that do not contain covert messages, or images that have not been tampered with. And, conversely, there is a class of images that is considered to be “unnatural”, i.e. images that contain watermarks, images that contain covert messages, or images that have been tampered with.

A Bernoulli Gaussian Watermark for Detecting Integrity Attacks in Control Systems

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Weerakkody, Sean; Ozel, Omur; Sinopoli, Bruno

We examine the merit of Bernoulli packet drops in actively detecting integrity attacks on control systems. The aim is to detect an adversary who delivers fake sensor measurements to a system operator in order to conceal their effect on the plant. Physical watermarks, or noisy additive Gaussian inputs, have been previously used to detect several classes of integrity attacks in control systems. In this paper, we consider the analysis and design of Gaussian physical watermarks in the presence of packet drops at the control input. On one hand, this enables analysis in a more general network setting. On the othermore » hand, we observe that in certain cases, Bernoulli packet drops can improve detection performance relative to a purely Gaussian watermark. This motivates the joint design of a Bernoulli-Gaussian watermark which incorporates both an additive Gaussian input and a Bernoulli drop process. We characterize the effect of such a watermark on system performance as well as attack detectability in two separate design scenarios. Here, we consider a correlation detector for attack recognition. We then propose efficiently solvable optimization problems to intelligently select parameters of the Gaussian input and the Bernoulli drop process while addressing security and performance trade-offs. Finally, we provide numerical results which illustrate that a watermark with packet drops can indeed outperform a Gaussian watermark.« less

Watermarking spot colors in packaging

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Reed, Alastair; Filler, TomáÅ.¡; Falkenstern, Kristyn; Bai, Yang

2015-03-01

In January 2014, Digimarc announced Digimarc® Barcode for the packaging industry to improve the check-out efficiency and customer experience for retailers. Digimarc Barcode is a machine readable code that carries the same information as a traditional Universal Product Code (UPC) and is introduced by adding a robust digital watermark to the package design. It is imperceptible to the human eye but can be read by a modern barcode scanner at the Point of Sale (POS) station. Compared to a traditional linear barcode, Digimarc Barcode covers the whole package with minimal impact on the graphic design. This significantly improves the Items per Minute (IPM) metric, which retailers use to track the checkout efficiency since it closely relates to their profitability. Increasing IPM by a few percent could lead to potential savings of millions of dollars for retailers, giving them a strong incentive to add the Digimarc Barcode to their packages. Testing performed by Digimarc showed increases in IPM of at least 33% using the Digimarc Barcode, compared to using a traditional barcode. A method of watermarking print ready image data used in the commercial packaging industry is described. A significant proportion of packages are printed using spot colors, therefore spot colors needs to be supported by an embedder for Digimarc Barcode. Digimarc Barcode supports the PANTONE spot color system, which is commonly used in the packaging industry. The Digimarc Barcode embedder allows a user to insert the UPC code in an image while minimizing perceptibility to the Human Visual System (HVS). The Digimarc Barcode is inserted in the printing ink domain, using an Adobe Photoshop plug-in as the last step before printing. Since Photoshop is an industry standard widely used by pre-press shops in the packaging industry, a Digimarc Barcode can be easily inserted and proofed.

High-fidelity data embedding for image annotation.

PubMed

He, Shan; Kirovski, Darko; Wu, Min

2009-02-01

High fidelity is a demanding requirement for data hiding, especially for images with artistic or medical value. This correspondence proposes a high-fidelity image watermarking for annotation with robustness to moderate distortion. To achieve the high fidelity of the embedded image, we introduce a visual perception model that aims at quantifying the local tolerance to noise for arbitrary imagery. Based on this model, we embed two kinds of watermarks: a pilot watermark that indicates the existence of the watermark and an information watermark that conveys a payload of several dozen bits. The objective is to embed 32 bits of metadata into a single image in such a way that it is robust to JPEG compression and cropping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the visual model and the application of the proposed annotation technology using a database of challenging photographic and medical images that contain a large amount of smooth regions.

An Efficient Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol Based on Chameleon Encryption

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Poh, Geong Sen; Martin, Keith M.

Buyer-seller watermarking protocols are designed to deter clients from illegally distributing copies of digital content. This is achieved by allowing a distributor to insert a unique watermark into content in such a way that the distributor does not know the final watermarked copy that is given to the client. This protects both the client and distributor from attempts by one to falsely accuse the other of misuse. Buyer-seller watermarking protocols are normally based on asymmetric cryptographic primitives known as homomorphic encryption schemes. However, the computational and communication overhead of this conventional approach is high. In this paper we propose a different approach, based on the symmetric Chameleon encryption scheme. We show that this leads to significant gains in computational and operational efficiency.

A Hybrid Digital-Signature and Zero-Watermarking Approach for Authentication and Protection of Sensitive Electronic Documents

PubMed Central

Kabir, Muhammad N.; Alginahi, Yasser M.

2014-01-01

This paper addresses the problems and threats associated with verification of integrity, proof of authenticity, tamper detection, and copyright protection for digital-text content. Such issues were largely addressed in the literature for images, audio, and video, with only a few papers addressing the challenge of sensitive plain-text media under known constraints. Specifically, with text as the predominant online communication medium, it becomes crucial that techniques are deployed to protect such information. A number of digital-signature, hashing, and watermarking schemes have been proposed that essentially bind source data or embed invisible data in a cover media to achieve its goal. While many such complex schemes with resource redundancies are sufficient in offline and less-sensitive texts, this paper proposes a hybrid approach based on zero-watermarking and digital-signature-like manipulations for sensitive text documents in order to achieve content originality and integrity verification without physically modifying the cover text in anyway. The proposed algorithm was implemented and shown to be robust against undetected content modifications and is capable of confirming proof of originality whilst detecting and locating deliberate/nondeliberate tampering. Additionally, enhancements in resource utilisation and reduced redundancies were achieved in comparison to traditional encryption-based approaches. Finally, analysis and remarks are made about the current state of the art, and future research issues are discussed under the given constraints. PMID:25254247

HDL-level automated watermarking of IP cores

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Castillo, E.; Meyer-Baese, U.; Parrilla, L.; García, A.; Lloris, A.

2008-04-01

This paper presents significant improvements to our previous watermarking technique for Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of IP cores. The technique relies on hosting the bits of a digital signature at the HDL design level using resources included within the original system. Thus, any attack trying to change or remove the digital signature will damage the design. The technique also includes a procedure for secure signature extraction requiring minimal modifications to the system. The new advances refer to increasing the applicability of this watermarking technique to any design, not only to those including look-ups, and the provision of an automatic tool for signature hosting purposes. Synthesis results show that the application of the proposed watermarking strategy results in negligible degradation of system performance and very low area penalties and that the use of the automated tool, in addition to easy the signature hosting, leads to reduced area penalties.

Self-synchronization for spread spectrum audio watermarks after time scale modification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nadeau, Andrew; Sharma, Gaurav

2014-02-01

De-synchronizing operations such as insertion, deletion, and warping pose significant challenges for watermarking. Because these operations are not typical for classical communications, watermarking techniques such as spread spectrum can perform poorly. Conversely, specialized synchronization solutions can be challenging to analyze/ optimize. This paper addresses desynchronization for blind spread spectrum watermarks, detected without reference to any unmodified signal, using the robustness properties of short blocks. Synchronization relies on dynamic time warping to search over block alignments to find a sequence with maximum correlation to the watermark. This differs from synchronization schemes that must first locate invariant features of the original signal, or estimate and reverse desynchronization before detection. Without these extra synchronization steps, analysis for the proposed scheme builds on classical SS concepts and allows characterizes the relationship between the size of search space (number of detection alignment tests) and intrinsic robustness (continuous search space region covered by each individual detection test). The critical metrics that determine the search space, robustness, and performance are: time-frequency resolution of the watermarking transform, and blocklength resolution of the alignment. Simultaneous robustness to (a) MP3 compression, (b) insertion/deletion, and (c) time-scale modification is also demonstrated for a practical audio watermarking scheme developed in the proposed framework.

Robust Audio Watermarking Scheme Based on Deterministic Plus Stochastic Model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dhar, Pranab Kumar; Kim, Cheol Hong; Kim, Jong-Myon

Digital watermarking has been widely used for protecting digital contents from unauthorized duplication. This paper proposes a new watermarking scheme based on spectral modeling synthesis (SMS) for copyright protection of digital contents. SMS defines a sound as a combination of deterministic events plus a stochastic component that makes it possible for a synthesized sound to attain all of the perceptual characteristics of the original sound. In our proposed scheme, watermarks are embedded into the highest prominent peak of the magnitude spectrum of each non-overlapping frame in peak trajectories. Simulation results indicate that the proposed watermarking scheme is highly robust against various kinds of attacks such as noise addition, cropping, re-sampling, re-quantization, and MP3 compression and achieves similarity values ranging from 17 to 22. In addition, our proposed scheme achieves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values ranging from 29 dB to 30 dB.

Quantum image processing: A review of advances in its security technologies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yan, Fei; Iliyasu, Abdullah M.; Le, Phuc Q.

In this review, we present an overview of the advances made in quantum image processing (QIP) comprising of the image representations, the operations realizable on them, and the likely protocols and algorithms for their applications. In particular, we focus on recent progresses on QIP-based security technologies including quantum watermarking, quantum image encryption, and quantum image steganography. This review is aimed at providing readers with a succinct, yet adequate compendium of the progresses made in the QIP sub-area. Hopefully, this effort will stimulate further interest aimed at the pursuit of more advanced algorithms and experimental validations for available technologies and extensions to other domains.

Multimodal biometric digital watermarking on immigrant visas for homeland security

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sasi, Sreela; Tamhane, Kirti C.; Rajappa, Mahesh B.

2004-08-01

Passengers with immigrant Visa's are a major concern to the International Airports due to the various fraud operations identified. To curb tampering of genuine Visa, the Visa's should contain human identification information. Biometric characteristic is a common and reliable way to authenticate the identity of an individual [1]. A Multimodal Biometric Human Identification System (MBHIS) that integrates iris code, DNA fingerprint, and the passport number on the Visa photograph using digital watermarking scheme is presented. Digital Watermarking technique is well suited for any system requiring high security [2]. Ophthalmologists [3], [4], [5] suggested that iris scan is an accurate and nonintrusive optical fingerprint. DNA sequence can be used as a genetic barcode [6], [7]. While issuing Visa at the US consulates, the DNA sequence isolated from saliva, the iris code and passport number shall be digitally watermarked in the Visa photograph. This information is also recorded in the 'immigrant database'. A 'forward watermarking phase' combines a 2-D DWT transformed digital photograph with the personal identification information. A 'detection phase' extracts the watermarked information from this VISA photograph at the port of entry, from which iris code can be used for identification and DNA biometric for authentication, if an anomaly arises.

Applications of a hologram watermarking protocol: aging-aware biometric signature verification and time validity check with personal documents

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vielhauer, Claus; Croce Ferri, Lucilla

2003-06-01

Our paper addresses two issues of a biometric authentication algorithm for ID cardholders previously presented namely the security of the embedded reference data and the aging process of the biometric data. We describe a protocol that allows two levels of verification, combining a biometric hash technique based on handwritten signature and hologram watermarks with cryptographic signatures in a verification infrastructure. This infrastructure consists of a Trusted Central Public Authority (TCPA), which serves numerous Enrollment Stations (ES) in a secure environment. Each individual performs an enrollment at an ES, which provides the TCPA with the full biometric reference data and a document hash. The TCPA then calculates the authentication record (AR) with the biometric hash, a validity timestamp, and a document hash provided by the ES. The AR is then signed with a cryptographic signature function, initialized with the TCPA's private key and embedded in the ID card as a watermark. Authentication is performed at Verification Stations (VS), where the ID card will be scanned and the signed AR is retrieved from the watermark. Due to the timestamp mechanism and a two level biometric verification technique based on offline and online features, the AR can deal with the aging process of the biometric feature by forcing a re-enrollment of the user after expiry, making use of the ES infrastructure. We describe some attack scenarios and we illustrate the watermarking embedding, retrieval and dispute protocols, analyzing their requisites, advantages and disadvantages in relation to security requirements.

GenInfoGuard--a robust and distortion-free watermarking technique for genetic data.

PubMed

Iftikhar, Saman; Khan, Sharifullah; Anwar, Zahid; Kamran, Muhammad

2015-01-01

Genetic data, in digital format, is used in different biological phenomena such as DNA translation, mRNA transcription and protein synthesis. The accuracy of these biological phenomena depend on genetic codes and all subsequent processes. To computerize the biological procedures, different domain experts are provided with the authorized access of the genetic codes; as a consequence, the ownership protection of such data is inevitable. For this purpose, watermarks serve as the proof of ownership of data. While protecting data, embedded hidden messages (watermarks) influence the genetic data; therefore, the accurate execution of the relevant processes and the overall result becomes questionable. Most of the DNA based watermarking techniques modify the genetic data and are therefore vulnerable to information loss. Distortion-free techniques make sure that no modifications occur during watermarking; however, they are fragile to malicious attacks and therefore cannot be used for ownership protection (particularly, in presence of a threat model). Therefore, there is a need for a technique that must be robust and should also prevent unwanted modifications. In this spirit, a watermarking technique with aforementioned characteristics has been proposed in this paper. The proposed technique makes sure that: (i) the ownership rights are protected by means of a robust watermark; and (ii) the integrity of genetic data is preserved. The proposed technique-GenInfoGuard-ensures its robustness through the "watermark encoding" in permuted values, and exhibits high decoding accuracy against various malicious attacks.

Smart security and securing data through watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Singh, Ritesh; Kumar, Lalit; Banik, Debraj; Sundar, S.

2017-11-01

The growth of image processing in embedded system has provided the boon of enhancing the security in various sectors. This lead to the developing of various protective strategies, which will be needed by private or public sectors for cyber security purposes. So, we have developed a method which uses digital water marking and locking mechanism for the protection of any closed premises. This paper describes a contemporary system based on user name, user id, password and encryption technique which can be placed in banks, protected offices to beef the security up. The burglary can be abated substantially by using a proactive safety structure. In this proposed framework, we are using water-marking in spatial domain to encode and decode the image and PIR(Passive Infrared Sensor) sensor to detect the existence of person in any close area.

Content fragile watermarking for H.264/AVC video authentication

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ait Sadi, K.; Guessoum, A.; Bouridane, A.; Khelifi, F.

2017-04-01

Discrete cosine transform is exploited in this work to generate the authentication data that are treated as a fragile watermark. This watermark is embedded in the motion vectors. The advances in multimedia technologies and digital processing tools have brought with them new challenges for the source and content authentication. To ensure the integrity of the H.264/AVC video stream, we introduce an approach based on a content fragile video watermarking method using an independent authentication of each group of pictures (GOPs) within the video. This technique uses robust visual features extracted from the video pertaining to the set of selected macroblocs (MBs) which hold the best partition mode in a tree-structured motion compensation process. An additional security degree is offered by the proposed method through using a more secured keyed function HMAC-SHA-256 and randomly choosing candidates from already selected MBs. In here, the watermark detection and verification processes are blind, whereas the tampered frames detection is not since it needs the original frames within the tampered GOPs. The proposed scheme achieves an accurate authentication technique with a high fragility and fidelity whilst maintaining the original bitrate and the perceptual quality. Furthermore, its ability to detect the tampered frames in case of spatial, temporal and colour manipulations is confirmed.

Design of an H.264/SVC resilient watermarking scheme

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Van Caenegem, Robrecht; Dooms, Ann; Barbarien, Joeri; Schelkens, Peter

2010-01-01

The rapid dissemination of media technologies has lead to an increase of unauthorized copying and distribution of digital media. Digital watermarking, i.e. embedding information in the multimedia signal in a robust and imperceptible manner, can tackle this problem. Recently, there has been a huge growth in the number of different terminals and connections that can be used to consume multimedia. To tackle the resulting distribution challenges, scalable coding is often employed. Scalable coding allows the adaptation of a single bit-stream to varying terminal and transmission characteristics. As a result of this evolution, watermarking techniques that are robust against scalable compression become essential in order to control illegal copying. In this paper, a watermarking technique resilient against scalable video compression using the state-of-the-art H.264/SVC codec is therefore proposed and evaluated.

Invisible watermarking optical camera communication and compatibility issues of IEEE 802.15.7r1 specification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Le, Nam-Tuan

2017-05-01

Copyright protection and information security are two most considered issues of digital data following the development of internet and computer network. As an important solution for protection, watermarking technology has become one of the challenged roles in industry and academic research. The watermarking technology can be classified by two categories: visible watermarking and invisible watermarking. With invisible technique, there is an advantage on user interaction because of the visibility. By applying watermarking for communication, it will be a challenge and a new direction for communication technology. In this paper we will propose one new research on communication technology using optical camera communications (OCC) based invisible watermarking. Beside the analysis on performance of proposed system, we also suggest the frame structure of PHY and MAC layer for IEEE 802.15.7r1 specification which is a revision of visible light communication (VLC) standardization.

Digital Watermarking of Autonomous Vehicles Imagery and Video Communication

DTIC Science & Technology

2005-10-01

world’s recent events, the increasing need in different domains, those being: spatial, spectral and corn- homeland security and defense is a critical topic...watermarking schemes benefit in that security and analysis is also vital, especially when using there is no need for full or partial decompression, which...are embedded Arguably, the most widely used technique is spread spec- change with each application. Whether it is secure covert trum watermarking (SS

Security Research on VoIP with Watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hu, Dong; Lee, Ping

2008-11-01

With the wide application of VoIP, many problems have occurred. One of the problems is security. The problems with securing VoIP systems, insufficient standardization and lack of security mechanisms emerged the need for new approaches and solutions. In this paper, we propose a new security architecture for VoIP which is based on digital watermarking which is a new, flexible and powerful technology that is increasingly gaining more and more attentions. Besides known applications e.g. to solve copyright protection problems, we propose to use digital watermarking to secure not only transmitted audio but also signaling protocol that VoIP is based on.

Quantum red-green-blue image steganography

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Heidari, Shahrokh; Pourarian, Mohammad Rasoul; Gheibi, Reza; Naseri, Mosayeb; Houshmand, Monireh

One of the most considering matters in the field of quantum information processing is quantum data hiding including quantum steganography and quantum watermarking. This field is an efficient tool for protecting any kind of digital data. In this paper, three quantum color images steganography algorithms are investigated based on Least Significant Bit (LSB). The first algorithm employs only one of the image’s channels to cover secret data. The second procedure is based on LSB XORing technique, and the last algorithm utilizes two channels to cover the color image for hiding secret quantum data. The performances of the proposed schemes are analyzed by using software simulations in MATLAB environment. The analysis of PSNR, BER and Histogram graphs indicate that the presented schemes exhibit acceptable performances and also theoretical analysis demonstrates that the networks complexity of the approaches scales squarely.

Shedding light on some possible remedies against watermark desynchronization: a case study

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barni, Mauro

2005-03-01

Watermark de-synchronization is perhaps the most dangerous attack against the great majority of watermarking systems proposed so far. Exhaustive search and template matching are two of the most popular solution against it, however several doubts exist about their effectiveness. As a matter of fact, a controversial point in digital watermarking is whether these techniques are of any help to cope with watermark de-synchronization introduced by geometric attacks. On one side, watermark synchronization through exhaustive search dramatically increases the false detection probability. On the other side, for the template matching approach the probability of a synchronization error must be taken into account, thus deteriorating significantly the performance of the system. It is the scope of this paper to shed some light on the above points. To do so we focus on a very simple case study, whereby we show that as long as the size of the search space (the cardinality of the geometric attack) increases polynomially with the length of the to-be-marked host feature sequence, both methods provide an effective solution to the de-synchronization problem. Interestingly, and rather surprisingly, we also show that Exhaustive Search Detection (ESD) always outperforms Template Matching Detection (TMD), though the general behavior of the two schemes is rather similar.

Novel medical image enhancement algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Agaian, Sos; McClendon, Stephen A.

2010-01-01

In this paper, we present two novel medical image enhancement algorithms. The first, a global image enhancement algorithm, utilizes an alpha-trimmed mean filter as its backbone to sharpen images. The second algorithm uses a cascaded unsharp masking technique to separate the high frequency components of an image in order for them to be enhanced using a modified adaptive contrast enhancement algorithm. Experimental results from enhancing electron microscopy, radiological, CT scan and MRI scan images, using the MATLAB environment, are then compared to the original images as well as other enhancement methods, such as histogram equalization and two forms of adaptive contrast enhancement. An image processing scheme for electron microscopy images of Purkinje cells will also be implemented and utilized as a comparison tool to evaluate the performance of our algorithm.

A fragile zero watermarking scheme to detect and characterize malicious modifications in database relations.

PubMed

Khan, Aihab; Husain, Syed Afaq

2013-01-01

We put forward a fragile zero watermarking scheme to detect and characterize malicious modifications made to a database relation. Most of the existing watermarking schemes for relational databases introduce intentional errors or permanent distortions as marks into the database original content. These distortions inevitably degrade the data quality and data usability as the integrity of a relational database is violated. Moreover, these fragile schemes can detect malicious data modifications but do not characterize the tempering attack, that is, the nature of tempering. The proposed fragile scheme is based on zero watermarking approach to detect malicious modifications made to a database relation. In zero watermarking, the watermark is generated (constructed) from the contents of the original data rather than introduction of permanent distortions as marks into the data. As a result, the proposed scheme is distortion-free; thus, it also resolves the inherent conflict between security and imperceptibility. The proposed scheme also characterizes the malicious data modifications to quantify the nature of tempering attacks. Experimental results show that even minor malicious modifications made to a database relation can be detected and characterized successfully.

Efficient image compression algorithm for computer-animated images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yfantis, Evangelos A.; Au, Matthew Y.; Miel, G.

1992-10-01

An image compression algorithm is described. The algorithm is an extension of the run-length image compression algorithm and its implementation is relatively easy. This algorithm was implemented and compared with other existing popular compression algorithms and with the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) coding. The Lempel-Ziv algorithm is available as a utility in the UNIX operating system and is also referred to as the UNIX uncompress. Sometimes our algorithm is best in terms of saving memory space, and sometimes one of the competing algorithms is best. The algorithm is lossless, and the intent is for the algorithm to be used in computer graphics animated images. Comparisons made with the LZ algorithm indicate that the decompression time using our algorithm is faster than that using the LZ algorithm. Once the data are in memory, a relatively simple and fast transformation is applied to uncompress the file.

New development of the image matching algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Xiaoqiang; Feng, Zhao

2018-04-01

To study the image matching algorithm, algorithm four elements are described, i.e., similarity measurement, feature space, search space and search strategy. Four common indexes for evaluating the image matching algorithm are described, i.e., matching accuracy, matching efficiency, robustness and universality. Meanwhile, this paper describes the principle of image matching algorithm based on the gray value, image matching algorithm based on the feature, image matching algorithm based on the frequency domain analysis, image matching algorithm based on the neural network and image matching algorithm based on the semantic recognition, and analyzes their characteristics and latest research achievements. Finally, the development trend of image matching algorithm is discussed. This study is significant for the algorithm improvement, new algorithm design and algorithm selection in practice.

A model for the distribution of watermarked digital content on mobile networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Frattolillo, Franco; D'Onofrio, Salvatore

2006-10-01

Although digital watermarking can be considered one of the key technologies to implement the copyright protection of digital contents distributed on the Internet, most of the content distribution models based on watermarking protocols proposed in literature have been purposely designed for fixed networks and cannot be easily adapted to mobile networks. On the contrary, the use of mobile devices currently enables new types of services and business models, and this makes the development of new content distribution models for mobile environments strategic in the current scenario of the Internet. This paper presents and discusses a distribution model of watermarked digital contents for such environments able to achieve a trade-off between the needs of efficiency and security.

Video watermarking for mobile phone applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mitrea, M.; Duta, S.; Petrescu, M.; Preteux, F.

2005-08-01

Nowadays, alongside with the traditional voice signal, music, video, and 3D characters tend to become common data to be run, stored and/or processed on mobile phones. Hence, to protect their related intellectual property rights also becomes a crucial issue. The video sequences involved in such applications are generally coded at very low bit rates. The present paper starts by presenting an accurate statistical investigation on such a video as well as on a very dangerous attack (the StirMark attack). The obtained results are turned into practice when adapting a spread spectrum watermarking method to such applications. The informed watermarking approach was also considered: an outstanding method belonging to this paradigm has been adapted and re evaluated under the low rate video constraint. The experimental results were conducted in collaboration with the SFR mobile services provider in France. They also allow a comparison between the spread spectrum and informed embedding techniques.

Efficient Hybrid Watermarking Scheme for Security and Transmission Bit Rate Enhancement of 3D Color-Plus-Depth Video Communication

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

El-Shafai, W.; El-Rabaie, S.; El-Halawany, M.; Abd El-Samie, F. E.

2018-03-01

Three-Dimensional Video-plus-Depth (3DV + D) comprises diverse video streams captured by different cameras around an object. Therefore, there is a great need to fulfill efficient compression to transmit and store the 3DV + D content in compressed form to attain future resource bounds whilst preserving a decisive reception quality. Also, the security of the transmitted 3DV + D is a critical issue for protecting its copyright content. This paper proposes an efficient hybrid watermarking scheme for securing the 3DV + D transmission, which is the homomorphic transform based Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. The objective of the proposed watermarking scheme is to increase the immunity of the watermarked 3DV + D to attacks and achieve adequate perceptual quality. Moreover, the proposed watermarking scheme reduces the transmission-bandwidth requirements for transmitting the color-plus-depth 3DV over limited-bandwidth wireless networks through embedding the depth frames into the color frames of the transmitted 3DV + D. Thus, it saves the transmission bit rate and subsequently it enhances the channel bandwidth-efficiency. The performance of the proposed watermarking scheme is compared with those of the state-of-the-art hybrid watermarking schemes. The comparisons depend on both the subjective visual results and the objective results; the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the watermarked frames and the Normalized Correlation (NC) of the extracted watermark frames. Extensive simulation results on standard 3DV + D sequences have been conducted in the presence of attacks. The obtained results confirm that the proposed hybrid watermarking scheme is robust in the presence of attacks. It achieves not only very good perceptual quality with appreciated PSNR values and saving in the transmission bit rate, but also high correlation coefficient values in the presence of attacks compared to the existing hybrid watermarking schemes.

Novel cooperative neural fusion algorithms for image restoration and image fusion.

PubMed

Xia, Youshen; Kamel, Mohamed S

2007-02-01

To deal with the problem of restoring degraded images with non-Gaussian noise, this paper proposes a novel cooperative neural fusion regularization (CNFR) algorithm for image restoration. Compared with conventional regularization algorithms for image restoration, the proposed CNFR algorithm can relax need of the optimal regularization parameter to be estimated. Furthermore, to enhance the quality of restored images, this paper presents a cooperative neural fusion (CNF) algorithm for image fusion. Compared with existing signal-level image fusion algorithms, the proposed CNF algorithm can greatly reduce the loss of contrast information under blind Gaussian noise environments. The performance analysis shows that the proposed two neural fusion algorithms can converge globally to the robust and optimal image estimate. Simulation results confirm that in different noise environments, the proposed two neural fusion algorithms can obtain a better image estimate than several well known image restoration and image fusion methods.

Fingerprinting with Wow

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yu, Eugene; Craver, Scott

2006-02-01

Wow, or time warping caused by speed fluctuations in analog audio equipment, provides a wealth of applications in watermarking. Very subtle temporal distortion has been used to defeat watermarks, and as components in watermarking systems. In the image domain, the analogous warping of an image's canvas has been used both to defeat watermarks and also proposed to prevent collusion attacks on fingerprinting systems. In this paper, we explore how subliminal levels of wow can be used for steganography and fingerprinting. We present both a low-bitrate robust solution and a higher-bitrate solution intended for steganographic communication. As already observed, such a fingerprinting algorithm naturally discourages collusion by averaging, owing to flanging effects when misaligned audio is averaged. Another advantage of warping is that even when imperceptible, it can be beyond the reach of compression algorithms. We use this opportunity to debunk the common misconception that steganography is impossible under "perfect compression."

Wavelet based mobile video watermarking: spread spectrum vs. informed embedding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mitrea, M.; Prêteux, F.; Duţă, S.; Petrescu, M.

2005-11-01

The cell phone expansion provides an additional direction for digital video content distribution: music clips, news, sport events are more and more transmitted toward mobile users. Consequently, from the watermarking point of view, a new challenge should be taken: very low bitrate contents (e.g. as low as 64 kbit/s) are now to be protected. Within this framework, the paper approaches for the first time the mathematical models for two random processes, namely the original video to be protected and a very harmful attack any watermarking method should face the StirMark attack. By applying an advanced statistical investigation (combining the Chi square, Ro, Fisher and Student tests) in the discrete wavelet domain, it is established that the popular Gaussian assumption can be very restrictively used when describing the former process and has nothing to do with the latter. As these results can a priori determine the performances of several watermarking methods, both of spread spectrum and informed embedding types, they should be considered in the design stage.

Physical Watermarking for Securing Cyber-Physical Systems via Packet Drop Injections

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Ozel, Omur; Weekrakkody, Sean; Sinopoli, Bruno

Physical watermarking is a well known solution for detecting integrity attacks on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) such as the smart grid. Here, a random control input is injected into the system in order to authenticate physical dynamics and sensors which may have been corrupted by adversaries. Packet drops may naturally occur in a CPS due to network imperfections. To our knowledge, previous work has not considered the role of packet drops in detecting integrity attacks. In this paper, we investigate the merit of injecting Bernoulli packet drops into the control inputs sent to actuators as a new physical watermarking scheme. Withmore » the classical linear quadratic objective function and an independent and identically distributed packet drop injection sequence, we study the effect of packet drops on meeting security and control objectives. Our results indicate that the packet drops could act as a potential physical watermark for attack detection in CPSs.« less

Spaceborne SAR Imaging Algorithm for Coherence Optimized.

PubMed

Qiu, Zhiwei; Yue, Jianping; Wang, Xueqin; Yue, Shun

2016-01-01

This paper proposes SAR imaging algorithm with largest coherence based on the existing SAR imaging algorithm. The basic idea of SAR imaging algorithm in imaging processing is that output signal can have maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by using the optimal imaging parameters. Traditional imaging algorithm can acquire the best focusing effect, but would bring the decoherence phenomenon in subsequent interference process. Algorithm proposed in this paper is that SAR echo adopts consistent imaging parameters in focusing processing. Although the SNR of the output signal is reduced slightly, their coherence is ensured greatly, and finally the interferogram with high quality is obtained. In this paper, two scenes of Envisat ASAR data in Zhangbei are employed to conduct experiment for this algorithm. Compared with the interferogram from the traditional algorithm, the results show that this algorithm is more suitable for SAR interferometry (InSAR) research and application.

Spaceborne SAR Imaging Algorithm for Coherence Optimized

PubMed Central

Qiu, Zhiwei; Yue, Jianping; Wang, Xueqin; Yue, Shun

2016-01-01

This paper proposes SAR imaging algorithm with largest coherence based on the existing SAR imaging algorithm. The basic idea of SAR imaging algorithm in imaging processing is that output signal can have maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by using the optimal imaging parameters. Traditional imaging algorithm can acquire the best focusing effect, but would bring the decoherence phenomenon in subsequent interference process. Algorithm proposed in this paper is that SAR echo adopts consistent imaging parameters in focusing processing. Although the SNR of the output signal is reduced slightly, their coherence is ensured greatly, and finally the interferogram with high quality is obtained. In this paper, two scenes of Envisat ASAR data in Zhangbei are employed to conduct experiment for this algorithm. Compared with the interferogram from the traditional algorithm, the results show that this algorithm is more suitable for SAR interferometry (InSAR) research and application. PMID:26871446

Comparison of subpixel image registration algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boye, R. R.; Nelson, C. L.

2009-02-01

Research into the use of multiframe superresolution has led to the development of algorithms for providing images with enhanced resolution using several lower resolution copies. An integral component of these algorithms is the determination of the registration of each of the low resolution images to a reference image. Without this information, no resolution enhancement can be attained. We have endeavored to find a suitable method for registering severely undersampled images by comparing several approaches. To test the algorithms, an ideal image is input to a simulated image formation program, creating several undersampled images with known geometric transformations. The registration algorithms are then applied to the set of low resolution images and the estimated registration parameters compared to the actual values. This investigation is limited to monochromatic images (extension to color images is not difficult) and only considers global geometric transformations. Each registration approach will be reviewed and evaluated with respect to the accuracy of the estimated registration parameters as well as the computational complexity required. In addition, the effects of image content, specifically spatial frequency content, as well as the immunity of the registration algorithms to noise will be discussed.

A modified non-binary LDPC scheme based on watermark symbols in high speed optical transmission systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Liming; Qiao, Yaojun; Yu, Qian; Zhang, Wenbo

2016-04-01

We introduce a watermark non-binary low-density parity check code (NB-LDPC) scheme, which can estimate the time-varying noise variance by using prior information of watermark symbols, to improve the performance of NB-LDPC codes. And compared with the prior-art counterpart, the watermark scheme can bring about 0.25 dB improvement in net coding gain (NCG) at bit error rate (BER) of 1e-6 and 36.8-81% reduction of the iteration numbers. Obviously, the proposed scheme shows great potential in terms of error correction performance and decoding efficiency.

Incorporation of perceptually adaptive QIM with singular value decomposition for blind audio watermarking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hu, Hwai-Tsu; Chou, Hsien-Hsin; Yu, Chu; Hsu, Ling-Yuan

2014-12-01

This paper presents a novel approach for blind audio watermarking. The proposed scheme utilizes the flexibility of discrete wavelet packet transformation (DWPT) to approximate the critical bands and adaptively determines suitable embedding strengths for carrying out quantization index modulation (QIM). The singular value decomposition (SVD) is employed to analyze the matrix formed by the DWPT coefficients and embed watermark bits by manipulating singular values subject to perceptual criteria. To achieve even better performance, two auxiliary enhancement measures are attached to the developed scheme. Performance evaluation and comparison are demonstrated with the presence of common digital signal processing attacks. Experimental results confirm that the combination of the DWPT, SVD, and adaptive QIM achieves imperceptible data hiding with satisfying robustness and payload capacity. Moreover, the inclusion of self-synchronization capability allows the developed watermarking system to withstand time-shifting and cropping attacks.

Color transfer algorithm in medical images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Weihong; Xu, Yangfa

2007-12-01

In digital virtual human project, image data acquires from the freezing slice of human body specimen. The color and brightness between a group of images of a certain organ could be quite different. The quality of these images could bring great difficulty in edge extraction, segmentation, as well as 3D reconstruction process. Thus it is necessary to unify the color of the images. The color transfer algorithm is a good algorithm to deal with this kind of problem. This paper introduces the principle of this algorithm and uses it in the medical image processing.

Digital watermarking in telemedicine applications--towards enhanced data security and accessibility.

PubMed

Giakoumaki, Aggeliki L; Perakis, Konstantinos; Tagaris, Anastassios; Koutsouris, Dimitris

2006-01-01

Implementing telemedical solutions has become a trend amongst the various research teams at an international level. Yet, contemporary information access and distribution technologies raise critical issues that urgently need to be addressed, especially those related to security. The paper suggests the use of watermarking in telemedical applications in order to enhance security of the transmitted sensitive medical data, familiarizes the users with a telemedical system and a watermarking module that have already been developed, and proposes an architecture that will enable the integration of the two systems, taking into account a variety of use cases and application scenarios.

The algorithm stitching for medical imaging

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Semenishchev, E.; Marchuk, V.; Voronin, V.; Pismenskova, M.; Tolstova, I.; Svirin, I.

2016-05-01

In this paper we propose a stitching algorithm of medical images into one. The algorithm is designed to stitching the medical x-ray imaging, biological particles in microscopic images, medical microscopic images and other. Such image can improve the diagnosis accuracy and quality for minimally invasive studies (e.g., laparoscopy, ophthalmology and other). The proposed algorithm is based on the following steps: the searching and selection areas with overlap boundaries; the keypoint and feature detection; the preliminary stitching images and transformation to reduce the visible distortion; the search a single unified borders in overlap area; brightness, contrast and white balance converting; the superimposition into a one image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the task of image stitching.

An algorithm for encryption of secret images into meaningful images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kanso, A.; Ghebleh, M.

2017-03-01

Image encryption algorithms typically transform a plain image into a noise-like cipher image, whose appearance is an indication of encrypted content. Bao and Zhou [Image encryption: Generating visually meaningful encrypted images, Information Sciences 324, 2015] propose encrypting the plain image into a visually meaningful cover image. This improves security by masking existence of encrypted content. Following their approach, we propose a lossless visually meaningful image encryption scheme which improves Bao and Zhou's algorithm by making the encrypted content, i.e. distortions to the cover image, more difficult to detect. Empirical results are presented to show high quality of the resulting images and high security of the proposed algorithm. Competence of the proposed scheme is further demonstrated by means of comparison with Bao and Zhou's scheme.

Performance evaluation of image segmentation algorithms on microscopic image data.

PubMed

Beneš, Miroslav; Zitová, Barbara

2015-01-01

In our paper, we present a performance evaluation of image segmentation algorithms on microscopic image data. In spite of the existence of many algorithms for image data partitioning, there is no universal and 'the best' method yet. Moreover, images of microscopic samples can be of various character and quality which can negatively influence the performance of image segmentation algorithms. Thus, the issue of selecting suitable method for a given set of image data is of big interest. We carried out a large number of experiments with a variety of segmentation methods to evaluate the behaviour of individual approaches on the testing set of microscopic images (cross-section images taken in three different modalities from the field of art restoration). The segmentation results were assessed by several indices used for measuring the output quality of image segmentation algorithms. In the end, the benefit of segmentation combination approach is studied and applicability of achieved results on another representatives of microscopic data category - biological samples - is shown. © 2014 The Authors Journal of Microscopy © 2014 Royal Microscopical Society.

An efficient and robust 3D mesh compression based on 3D watermarking and wavelet transform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zagrouba, Ezzeddine; Ben Jabra, Saoussen; Didi, Yosra

2011-06-01

The compression and watermarking of 3D meshes are very important in many areas of activity including digital cinematography, virtual reality as well as CAD design. However, most studies on 3D watermarking and 3D compression are done independently. To verify a good trade-off between protection and a fast transfer of 3D meshes, this paper proposes a new approach which combines 3D mesh compression with mesh watermarking. This combination is based on a wavelet transformation. In fact, the used compression method is decomposed to two stages: geometric encoding and topologic encoding. The proposed approach consists to insert a signature between these two stages. First, the wavelet transformation is applied to the original mesh to obtain two components: wavelets coefficients and a coarse mesh. Then, the geometric encoding is done on these two components. The obtained coarse mesh will be marked using a robust mesh watermarking scheme. This insertion into coarse mesh allows obtaining high robustness to several attacks. Finally, the topologic encoding is applied to the marked coarse mesh to obtain the compressed mesh. The combination of compression and watermarking permits to detect the presence of signature after a compression of the marked mesh. In plus, it allows transferring protected 3D meshes with the minimum size. The experiments and evaluations show that the proposed approach presents efficient results in terms of compression gain, invisibility and robustness of the signature against of many attacks.

An improved NAS-RIF algorithm for image restoration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gao, Weizhe; Zou, Jianhua; Xu, Rong; Liu, Changhai; Li, Hengnian

2016-10-01

Space optical images are inevitably degraded by atmospheric turbulence, error of the optical system and motion. In order to get the true image, a novel nonnegativity and support constants recursive inverse filtering (NAS-RIF) algorithm is proposed to restore the degraded image. Firstly the image noise is weaken by Contourlet denoising algorithm. Secondly, the reliable object support region estimation is used to accelerate the algorithm convergence. We introduce the optimal threshold segmentation technology to improve the object support region. Finally, an object construction limit and the logarithm function are added to enhance algorithm stability. Experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed algorithm can increase the PSNR, and improve the quality of the restored images. The convergence speed of the proposed algorithm is faster than that of the original NAS-RIF algorithm.

Study of image matching algorithm and sub-pixel fitting algorithm in target tracking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Ming-dong; Jia, Jianjun; Qiang, Jia; Wang, Jian-yu

2015-03-01

Image correlation matching is a tracking method that searched a region most approximate to the target template based on the correlation measure between two images. Because there is no need to segment the image, and the computation of this method is little. Image correlation matching is a basic method of target tracking. This paper mainly studies the image matching algorithm of gray scale image, which precision is at sub-pixel level. The matching algorithm used in this paper is SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) method. This method excels in real-time systems because of its low computation complexity. The SAD method is introduced firstly and the most frequently used sub-pixel fitting algorithms are introduced at the meantime. These fitting algorithms can't be used in real-time systems because they are too complex. However, target tracking often requires high real-time performance, we put forward a fitting algorithm named paraboloidal fitting algorithm based on the consideration above, this algorithm is simple and realized easily in real-time system. The result of this algorithm is compared with that of surface fitting algorithm through image matching simulation. By comparison, the precision difference between these two algorithms is little, it's less than 0.01pixel. In order to research the influence of target rotation on precision of image matching, the experiment of camera rotation was carried on. The detector used in the camera is a CMOS detector. It is fixed to an arc pendulum table, take pictures when the camera rotated different angles. Choose a subarea in the original picture as the template, and search the best matching spot using image matching algorithm mentioned above. The result shows that the matching error is bigger when the target rotation angle is larger. It's an approximate linear relation. Finally, the influence of noise on matching precision was researched. Gaussian noise and pepper and salt noise were added in the image respectively, and the image

Evaluating an image-fusion algorithm with synthetic-image-generation tools

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gross, Harry N.; Schott, John R.

1996-06-01

An algorithm that combines spectral mixing and nonlinear optimization is used to fuse multiresolution images. Image fusion merges images of different spatial and spectral resolutions to create a high spatial resolution multispectral combination. High spectral resolution allows identification of materials in the scene, while high spatial resolution locates those materials. In this algorithm, conventional spectral mixing estimates the percentage of each material (called endmembers) within each low resolution pixel. Three spectral mixing models are compared; unconstrained, partially constrained, and fully constrained. In the partially constrained application, the endmember fractions are required to sum to one. In the fully constrained application, all fractions are additionally required to lie between zero and one. While negative fractions seem inappropriate, they can arise from random spectral realizations of the materials. In the second part of the algorithm, the low resolution fractions are used as inputs to a constrained nonlinear optimization that calculates the endmember fractions for the high resolution pixels. The constraints mirror the low resolution constraints and maintain consistency with the low resolution fraction results. The algorithm can use one or more higher resolution sharpening images to locate the endmembers to high spatial accuracy. The algorithm was evaluated with synthetic image generation (SIG) tools. A SIG developed image can be used to control the various error sources that are likely to impair the algorithm performance. These error sources include atmospheric effects, mismodeled spectral endmembers, and variability in topography and illumination. By controlling the introduction of these errors, the robustness of the algorithm can be studied and improved upon. The motivation for this research is to take advantage of the next generation of multi/hyperspectral sensors. Although the hyperspectral images will be of modest to low resolution

Efficient 3D Watermarked Video Communication with Chaotic Interleaving, Convolution Coding, and LMMSE Equalization

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

El-Shafai, W.; El-Bakary, E. M.; El-Rabaie, S.; Zahran, O.; El-Halawany, M.; Abd El-Samie, F. E.

2017-06-01

Three-Dimensional Multi-View Video (3D-MVV) transmission over wireless networks suffers from Macro-Blocks losses due to either packet dropping or fading-motivated bit errors. Thus, the robust performance of 3D-MVV transmission schemes over wireless channels becomes a recent considerable hot research issue due to the restricted resources and the presence of severe channel errors. The 3D-MVV is composed of multiple video streams shot by several cameras around a single object, simultaneously. Therefore, it is an urgent task to achieve high compression ratios to meet future bandwidth constraints. Unfortunately, the highly-compressed 3D-MVV data becomes more sensitive and vulnerable to packet losses, especially in the case of heavy channel faults. Thus, in this paper, we suggest the application of a chaotic Baker interleaving approach with equalization and convolution coding for efficient Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) watermarked 3D-MVV transmission over an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing wireless system. Rayleigh fading and Additive White Gaussian Noise are considered in the real scenario of 3D-MVV transmission. The SVD watermarked 3D-MVV frames are primarily converted to their luminance and chrominance components, which are then converted to binary data format. After that, chaotic interleaving is applied prior to the modulation process. It is used to reduce the channel effects on the transmitted bit streams and it also adds a degree of encryption to the transmitted 3D-MVV frames. To test the performance of the proposed framework; several simulation experiments on different SVD watermarked 3D-MVV frames have been executed. The experimental results show that the received SVD watermarked 3D-MVV frames still have high Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios and watermark extraction is possible in the proposed framework.

An enhanced fast scanning algorithm for image segmentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ismael, Ahmed Naser; Yusof, Yuhanis binti

2015-12-01

Segmentation is an essential and important process that separates an image into regions that have similar characteristics or features. This will transform the image for a better image analysis and evaluation. An important benefit of segmentation is the identification of region of interest in a particular image. Various algorithms have been proposed for image segmentation and this includes the Fast Scanning algorithm which has been employed on food, sport and medical images. It scans all pixels in the image and cluster each pixel according to the upper and left neighbor pixels. The clustering process in Fast Scanning algorithm is performed by merging pixels with similar neighbor based on an identified threshold. Such an approach will lead to a weak reliability and shape matching of the produced segments. This paper proposes an adaptive threshold function to be used in the clustering process of the Fast Scanning algorithm. This function used the gray'value in the image's pixels and variance Also, the level of the image that is more the threshold are converted into intensity values between 0 and 1, and other values are converted into intensity values zero. The proposed enhanced Fast Scanning algorithm is realized on images of the public and private transportation in Iraq. Evaluation is later made by comparing the produced images of proposed algorithm and the standard Fast Scanning algorithm. The results showed that proposed algorithm is faster in terms the time from standard fast scanning.

Psychophysical Comparisons in Image Compression Algorithms.

DTIC Science & Technology

1999-03-01

Leister, M., "Lossy Lempel - Ziv Algorithm for Large Alphabet Sources and Applications to Image Compression ," IEEE Proceedings, v.I, pp. 225-228, September...1623-1642, September 1990. Sanford, M.A., An Analysis of Data Compression Algorithms used in the Transmission of Imagery, Master’s Thesis, Naval...NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL Monterey, California THESIS PSYCHOPHYSICAL COMPARISONS IN IMAGE COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS by % Christopher J. Bodine • March

FIVQ algorithm for interference hyper-spectral image compression

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wen, Jia; Ma, Caiwen; Zhao, Junsuo

2014-07-01

Based on the improved vector quantization (IVQ) algorithm [1] which was proposed in 2012, this paper proposes a further improved vector quantization (FIVQ) algorithm for LASIS (Large Aperture Static Imaging Spectrometer) interference hyper-spectral image compression. To get better image quality, IVQ algorithm takes both the mean values and the VQ indices as the encoding rules. Although IVQ algorithm can improve both the bit rate and the image quality, it still can be further improved in order to get much lower bit rate for the LASIS interference pattern with the special optical characteristics based on the pushing and sweeping in LASIS imaging principle. In the proposed algorithm FIVQ, the neighborhood of the encoding blocks of the interference pattern image, which are using the mean value rules, will be checked whether they have the same mean value as the current processing block. Experiments show the proposed algorithm FIVQ can get lower bit rate compared to that of the IVQ algorithm for the LASIS interference hyper-spectral sequences.

Improved Bat Algorithm Applied to Multilevel Image Thresholding

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Multilevel image thresholding is a very important image processing technique that is used as a basis for image segmentation and further higher level processing. However, the required computational time for exhaustive search grows exponentially with the number of desired thresholds. Swarm intelligence metaheuristics are well known as successful and efficient optimization methods for intractable problems. In this paper, we adjusted one of the latest swarm intelligence algorithms, the bat algorithm, for the multilevel image thresholding problem. The results of testing on standard benchmark images show that the bat algorithm is comparable with other state-of-the-art algorithms. We improved standard bat algorithm, where our modifications add some elements from the differential evolution and from the artificial bee colony algorithm. Our new proposed improved bat algorithm proved to be better than five other state-of-the-art algorithms, improving quality of results in all cases and significantly improving convergence speed. PMID:25165733

Quantum Image Steganography and Steganalysis Based On LSQu-Blocks Image Information Concealing Algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

A. AL-Salhi, Yahya E.; Lu, Songfeng

2016-08-01

Quantum steganography can solve some problems that are considered inefficient in image information concealing. It researches on Quantum image information concealing to have been widely exploited in recent years. Quantum image information concealing can be categorized into quantum image digital blocking, quantum image stereography, anonymity and other branches. Least significant bit (LSB) information concealing plays vital roles in the classical world because many image information concealing algorithms are designed based on it. Firstly, based on the novel enhanced quantum representation (NEQR), image uniform blocks clustering around the concrete the least significant Qu-block (LSQB) information concealing algorithm for quantum image steganography is presented. Secondly, a clustering algorithm is proposed to optimize the concealment of important data. Finally, we used Con-Steg algorithm to conceal the clustered image blocks. Information concealing located on the Fourier domain of an image can achieve the security of image information, thus we further discuss the Fourier domain LSQu-block information concealing algorithm for quantum image based on Quantum Fourier Transforms. In our algorithms, the corresponding unitary Transformations are designed to realize the aim of concealing the secret information to the least significant Qu-block representing color of the quantum cover image. Finally, the procedures of extracting the secret information are illustrated. Quantum image LSQu-block image information concealing algorithm can be applied in many fields according to different needs.

Digital Watermarks Enabling E-Commerce Strategies: Conditional and User Specific Access to Services and Resources

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dittmann, Jana; Steinebach, Martin; Wohlmacher, Petra; Ackermann, Ralf

2002-12-01

Digital watermarking is well known as enabling technology to prove ownership on copyrighted material, detect originators of illegally made copies, monitor the usage of the copyrighted multimedia data and analyze the spread spectrum of the data over networks and servers. Research has shown that data hiding techniques can be applied successfully to other application areas like manipulations recognition. In this paper, we show our innovative approach for integrating watermark and cryptography based methods within a framework of new application scenarios spanning a wide range from dedicated and user specific services, "Try&Buy" mechanisms to general means for long-term customer relationships. The tremendous recent efforts to develop and deploy ubiquitous mobile communication possibilities are changing the demands but also possibilities for establishing new business and commerce relationships. Especially we motivate annotation watermarks and aspects of M-Commerce to show important scenarios for access control. Based on a description of the challenges of the application domain and our latest work we discuss, which methods can be used for establishing services in a fast convenient and secure way for conditional access services based on digital watermarking combined with cryptographic techniques. We introduce an example scenario for digital audio and an overview of steps in order to establish these concepts practically.

An Image Encryption Algorithm Based on Information Hiding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ge, Xin; Lu, Bin; Liu, Fenlin; Gong, Daofu

Aiming at resolving the conflict between security and efficiency in the design of chaotic image encryption algorithms, an image encryption algorithm based on information hiding is proposed based on the “one-time pad” idea. A random parameter is introduced to ensure a different keystream for each encryption, which has the characteristics of “one-time pad”, improving the security of the algorithm rapidly without significant increase in algorithm complexity. The random parameter is embedded into the ciphered image with information hiding technology, which avoids negotiation for its transport and makes the application of the algorithm easier. Algorithm analysis and experiments show that the algorithm is secure against chosen plaintext attack, differential attack and divide-and-conquer attack, and has good statistical properties in ciphered images.

Least significant qubit algorithm for quantum images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sang, Jianzhi; Wang, Shen; Li, Qiong

2016-11-01

To study the feasibility of the classical image least significant bit (LSB) information hiding algorithm on quantum computer, a least significant qubit (LSQb) information hiding algorithm of quantum image is proposed. In this paper, we focus on a novel quantum representation for color digital images (NCQI). Firstly, by designing the three qubits comparator and unitary operators, the reasonability and feasibility of LSQb based on NCQI are presented. Then, the concrete LSQb information hiding algorithm is proposed, which can realize the aim of embedding the secret qubits into the least significant qubits of RGB channels of quantum cover image. Quantum circuit of the LSQb information hiding algorithm is also illustrated. Furthermore, the secrets extracting algorithm and circuit are illustrated through utilizing control-swap gates. The two merits of our algorithm are: (1) it is absolutely blind and (2) when extracting secret binary qubits, it does not need any quantum measurement operation or any other help from classical computer. Finally, simulation and comparative analysis show the performance of our algorithm.

From watermarking to in-band enrichment: future trends

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mitrea, M.; Prêteux, F.

2009-02-01

Coming across with the emerging Knowledge Society, the enriched video is nowadays a hot research topic, from both academic and industrial perspectives. The principle consists in associating to the video stream some metadata of various types (textual, audio, video, executable codes, ...). This new content is to be further exploited in a large variety of applications, like interactive DTV, games, e-learning, and data mining, for instance. This paper brings into evidence the potentiality of the watermarking techniques for such an application. By inserting the enrichment data into the very video to be enriched, three main advantages are ensured. First, no additional complexity is required from the terminal and the representation format point of view. Secondly, no backward compatibility issue is encountered, thus allowing a unique system to accommodate services from several generations. Finally, the network adaptation constraints are alleviated. The discussion is structured on both theoretical aspects (the accurate evaluation of the watermarking capacity in several reallife scenarios) as well as on applications developed under the framework of the R&D contracts conducted at the ARTEMIS Department.

The Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering (CASE). Visiting Faculty Research Program 06 March 2007 to 05 March 2009

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-09-01

and could be used to compensate for high frequency distortions to the LOS caused by platform jitter and the effects of the optical turbulence . In...engineer an unknown detector based on few experimental interactions. For watermarking algorithms in particular, we seek to identify specific distortions ...of a watermarked image that clearly identify or rule out one particular class of embedding. These experimental distortions surgical test for rapid

Fast perceptual image hash based on cascade algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ruchay, Alexey; Kober, Vitaly; Yavtushenko, Evgeniya

2017-09-01

In this paper, we propose a perceptual image hash algorithm based on cascade algorithm, which can be applied in image authentication, retrieval, and indexing. Image perceptual hash uses for image retrieval in sense of human perception against distortions caused by compression, noise, common signal processing and geometrical modifications. The main disadvantage of perceptual hash is high time expenses. In the proposed cascade algorithm of image retrieval initializes with short hashes, and then a full hash is applied to the processed results. Computer simulation results show that the proposed hash algorithm yields a good performance in terms of robustness, discriminability, and time expenses.

SKL algorithm based fabric image matching and retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cao, Yichen; Zhang, Xueqin; Ma, Guojian; Sun, Rongqing; Dong, Deping

2017-07-01

Intelligent computer image processing technology provides convenience and possibility for designers to carry out designs. Shape analysis can be achieved by extracting SURF feature. However, high dimension of SURF feature causes to lower matching speed. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a fast fabric image matching algorithm based on SURF K-means and LSH algorithm. By constructing the bag of visual words on K-Means algorithm, and forming feature histogram of each image, the dimension of SURF feature is reduced at the first step. Then with the help of LSH algorithm, the features are encoded and the dimension is further reduced. In addition, the indexes of each image and each class of image are created, and the number of matching images is decreased by LSH hash bucket. Experiments on fabric image database show that this algorithm can speed up the matching and retrieval process, the result can satisfy the requirement of dress designers with accuracy and speed.

Watermark: An Application and Methodology and Application for Interactive and intelligent Decision Support for Groundwater Systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pierce, S. A.; Wagner, K.; Schwartz, S.; Gentle, J. N., Jr.

2016-12-01

Critical water resources face the effects of historic drought, increased demand, and potential contamination, the need has never been greater to develop resources to effectively communicate conservation and protection across a broad audience and geographical area. The Watermark application and macro-analysis methodology merges topical analysis of context rich corpus from policy texts with multi-attributed solution sets from integrated models of water resource and other subsystems, such as mineral, food, energy, or environmental systems to construct a scalable, robust, and reproducible approach for identifying links between policy and science knowledge bases. The Watermark application is an open-source, interactive workspace to support science-based visualization and decision making. Designed with generalization in mind, Watermark is a flexible platform that allows for data analysis and inclusion of large datasets with an interactive front-end capable of connecting with other applications as well as advanced computing resources. In addition, the Watermark analysis methodology offers functionality that streamlines communication with non-technical users for policy, education, or engagement with groups around scientific topics of societal relevance. The technology stack for Watermark was selected with the goal of creating a robust and dynamic modular codebase that can be adjusted to fit many use cases and scale to support usage loads that range between simple data display to complex scientific simulation-based modelling and analytics. The methodology uses to topical analysis and simulation-optimization to systematically analyze the policy and management realities of resource systems and explicitly connect the social and problem contexts with science-based and engineering knowledge from models. A case example demonstrates use in a complex groundwater resources management study highlighting multi-criteria spatial decision making and uncertainty comparisons.

Lossless compression algorithm for multispectral imagers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gladkova, Irina; Grossberg, Michael; Gottipati, Srikanth

2008-08-01

Multispectral imaging is becoming an increasingly important tool for monitoring the earth and its environment from space borne and airborne platforms. Multispectral imaging data consists of visible and IR measurements from a scene across space and spectrum. Growing data rates resulting from faster scanning and finer spatial and spectral resolution makes compression an increasingly critical tool to reduce data volume for transmission and archiving. Research for NOAA NESDIS has been directed to finding for the characteristics of satellite atmospheric Earth science Imager sensor data what level of Lossless compression ratio can be obtained as well as appropriate types of mathematics and approaches that can lead to approaching this data's entropy level. Conventional lossless do not achieve the theoretical limits for lossless compression on imager data as estimated from the Shannon entropy. In a previous paper, the authors introduce a lossless compression algorithm developed for MODIS as a proxy for future NOAA-NESDIS satellite based Earth science multispectral imagers such as GOES-R. The algorithm is based on capturing spectral correlations using spectral prediction, and spatial correlations with a linear transform encoder. In decompression, the algorithm uses a statistically computed look up table to iteratively predict each channel from a channel decompressed in the previous iteration. In this paper we present a new approach which fundamentally differs from our prior work. In this new approach, instead of having a single predictor for each pair of bands we introduce a piecewise spatially varying predictor which significantly improves the compression results. Our new algorithm also now optimizes the sequence of channels we use for prediction. Our results are evaluated by comparison with a state of the art wavelet based image compression scheme, Jpeg2000. We present results on the 14 channel subset of the MODIS imager, which serves as a proxy for the GOES-R imager. We

Digital watermarking for secure and adaptive teleconferencing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vorbrueggen, Jan C.; Thorwirth, Niels

2002-04-01

The EC-sponsored project ANDROID aims to develop a management system for secure active networks. Active network means allowing the network's customers to execute code (Java-based so-called proxylets) on parts of the network infrastructure. Secure means that the network operator nonetheless retains full control over the network and its resources, and that proxylets use ANDROID-developed facilities to provide secure applications. Management is based on policies and allows autonomous, distributed decisions and actions to be taken. Proxylets interface with the system via policies; among actions they can take is controlling execution of other proxylets or redirection of network traffic. Secure teleconferencing is used as the application to demonstrate the approach's advantages. A way to control a teleconference's data streams is to use digital watermarking of the video, audio and/or shared-whiteboard streams, providing an imperceptible and inseparable side channel that delivers information from originating or intermediate stations to downstream stations. Depending on the information carried by the watermark, these stations can take many different actions. Examples are forwarding decisions based on security classifications (possibly time-varying) at security boundaries, set-up and tear-down of virtual private networks, intelligent and adaptive transcoding, recorder or playback control (e.g., speaking off the record), copyright protection, and sender authentication.

Real-time Imaging Orientation Determination System to Verify Imaging Polarization Navigation Algorithm

PubMed Central

Lu, Hao; Zhao, Kaichun; Wang, Xiaochu; You, Zheng; Huang, Kaoli

2016-01-01

Bio-inspired imaging polarization navigation which can provide navigation information and is capable of sensing polarization information has advantages of high-precision and anti-interference over polarization navigation sensors that use photodiodes. Although all types of imaging polarimeters exist, they may not qualify for the research on the imaging polarization navigation algorithm. To verify the algorithm, a real-time imaging orientation determination system was designed and implemented. Essential calibration procedures for the type of system that contained camera parameter calibration and the inconsistency of complementary metal oxide semiconductor calibration were discussed, designed, and implemented. Calibration results were used to undistort and rectify the multi-camera system. An orientation determination experiment was conducted. The results indicated that the system could acquire and compute the polarized skylight images throughout the calibrations and resolve orientation by the algorithm to verify in real-time. An orientation determination algorithm based on image processing was tested on the system. The performance and properties of the algorithm were evaluated. The rate of the algorithm was over 1 Hz, the error was over 0.313°, and the population standard deviation was 0.148° without any data filter. PMID:26805851

Progressive transmission of secured images with authentication using decompositions into monovariate functions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Leni, Pierre-Emmanuel; Fougerolle, Yohan D.; Truchetet, Frédéric

2014-05-01

We propose a progressive transmission approach of an image authenticated using an overlapping subimage that can be removed to restore the original image. Our approach is different from most visible watermarking approaches that allow one to later remove the watermark, because the mark is not directly introduced in the two-dimensional image space. Instead, it is rather applied to an equivalent monovariate representation of the image. Precisely, the approach is based on our progressive transmission approach that relies on a modified Kolmogorov spline network, and therefore inherits its advantages: resilience to packet losses during transmission and support of heterogeneous display environments. The marked image can be accessed at any intermediate resolution, and a key is needed to remove the mark to fully recover the original image without loss. Moreover, the key can be different for every resolution, and the images can be globally restored in case of packet losses during the transmission. Our contributions lie in the proposition of decomposing a mark (an overlapping image) and an image into monovariate functions following the Kolmogorov superposition theorem; and in the combination of these monovariate functions to provide a removable visible "watermarking" of images with the ability to restore the original image using a key.

Associated diacritical watermarking approach to protect sensitive arabic digital texts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kamaruddin, Nurul Shamimi; Kamsin, Amirrudin; Hakak, Saqib

2017-10-01

Among multimedia content, one of the most predominant medium is text content. There have been lots of efforts to protect and secure text information over the Internet. The limitations of existing works have been identified in terms of watermark capacity, time complexity and memory complexity. In this work, an invisible digital watermarking approach has been proposed to protect and secure the most sensitive text i.e. Digital Holy Quran. The proposed approach works by XOR-ing only those Quranic letters that has certain diacritics associated with it. Due to sensitive nature of Holy Quran, diacritics play vital role in the meaning of the particular verse. Hence, securing letters with certain diacritics will preserve the original meaning of Quranic verses in case of alternation attempt. Initial results have shown that the proposed approach is promising with less memory complexity and time complexity compared to existing approaches.

Comparison of SeaWinds Backscatter Imaging Algorithms

PubMed Central

Long, David G.

2017-01-01

This paper compares the performance and tradeoffs of various backscatter imaging algorithms for the SeaWinds scatterometer when multiple passes over a target are available. Reconstruction methods are compared with conventional gridding algorithms. In particular, the performance and tradeoffs in conventional ‘drop in the bucket’ (DIB) gridding at the intrinsic sensor resolution are compared to high-spatial-resolution imaging algorithms such as fine-resolution DIB and the scatterometer image reconstruction (SIR) that generate enhanced-resolution backscatter images. Various options for each algorithm are explored, including considering both linear and dB computation. The effects of sampling density and reconstruction quality versus time are explored. Both simulated and actual data results are considered. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of high-resolution reconstruction using SIR as well as its limitations and the limitations of DIB and fDIB. PMID:28828143

An algorithm for calculi segmentation on ureteroscopic images.

PubMed

Rosa, Benoît; Mozer, Pierre; Szewczyk, Jérôme

2011-03-01

The purpose of the study is to develop an algorithm for the segmentation of renal calculi on ureteroscopic images. In fact, renal calculi are common source of urological obstruction, and laser lithotripsy during ureteroscopy is a possible therapy. A laser-based system to sweep the calculus surface and vaporize it was developed to automate a very tedious manual task. The distal tip of the ureteroscope is directed using image guidance, and this operation is not possible without an efficient segmentation of renal calculi on the ureteroscopic images. We proposed and developed a region growing algorithm to segment renal calculi on ureteroscopic images. Using real video images to compute ground truth and compare our segmentation with a reference segmentation, we computed statistics on different image metrics, such as Precision, Recall, and Yasnoff Measure, for comparison with ground truth. The algorithm and its parameters were established for the most likely clinical scenarii. The segmentation results are encouraging: the developed algorithm was able to correctly detect more than 90% of the surface of the calculi, according to an expert observer. Implementation of an algorithm for the segmentation of calculi on ureteroscopic images is feasible. The next step is the integration of our algorithm in the command scheme of a motorized system to build a complete operating prototype.

Image processing meta-algorithm development via genetic manipulation of existing algorithm graphs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schalkoff, Robert J.; Shaaban, Khaled M.

1999-07-01

Automatic algorithm generation for image processing applications is not a new idea, however previous work is either restricted to morphological operates or impractical. In this paper, we show recent research result in the development and use of meta-algorithms, i.e. algorithms which lead to new algorithms. Although the concept is generally applicable, the application domain in this work is restricted to image processing. The meta-algorithm concept described in this paper is based upon out work in dynamic algorithm. The paper first present the concept of dynamic algorithms which, on the basis of training and archived algorithmic experience embedded in an algorithm graph (AG), dynamically adjust the sequence of operations applied to the input image data. Each node in the tree-based representation of a dynamic algorithm with out degree greater than 2 is a decision node. At these nodes, the algorithm examines the input data and determines which path will most likely achieve the desired results. This is currently done using nearest-neighbor classification. The details of this implementation are shown. The constrained perturbation of existing algorithm graphs, coupled with a suitable search strategy, is one mechanism to achieve meta-algorithm an doffers rich potential for the discovery of new algorithms. In our work, a meta-algorithm autonomously generates new dynamic algorithm graphs via genetic recombination of existing algorithm graphs. The AG representation is well suited to this genetic-like perturbation, using a commonly- employed technique in artificial neural network synthesis, namely the blueprint representation of graphs. A number of exam. One of the principal limitations of our current approach is the need for significant human input in the learning phase. Efforts to overcome this limitation are discussed. Future research directions are indicated.

Adaptive Algorithms for Automated Processing of Document Images

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-01-01

ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: ADAPTIVE ALGORITHMS FOR AUTOMATED PROCESSING OF DOCUMENT IMAGES Mudit Agrawal, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011...2011 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Adaptive Algorithms for Automated Processing of Document Images 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER 5b. GRANT NUMBER 5c. PROGRAM...ALGORITHMS FOR AUTOMATED PROCESSING OF DOCUMENT IMAGES by Mudit Agrawal Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University

Medical Image Tamper Detection Based on Passive Image Authentication.

PubMed

Ulutas, Guzin; Ustubioglu, Arda; Ustubioglu, Beste; V Nabiyev, Vasif; Ulutas, Mustafa

2017-12-01

Telemedicine has gained popularity in recent years. Medical images can be transferred over the Internet to enable the telediagnosis between medical staffs and to make the patient's history accessible to medical staff from anywhere. Therefore, integrity protection of the medical image is a serious concern due to the broadcast nature of the Internet. Some watermarking techniques are proposed to control the integrity of medical images. However, they require embedding of extra information (watermark) into image before transmission. It decreases visual quality of the medical image and can cause false diagnosis. The proposed method uses passive image authentication mechanism to detect the tampered regions on medical images. Structural texture information is obtained from the medical image by using local binary pattern rotation invariant (LBPROT) to make the keypoint extraction techniques more successful. Keypoints on the texture image are obtained with scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). Tampered regions are detected by the method by matching the keypoints. The method improves the keypoint-based passive image authentication mechanism (they do not detect tampering when the smooth region is used for covering an object) by using LBPROT before keypoint extraction because smooth regions also have texture information. Experimental results show that the method detects tampered regions on the medical images even if the forged image has undergone some attacks (Gaussian blurring/additive white Gaussian noise) or the forged regions are scaled/rotated before pasting.

[An improved medical image fusion algorithm and quality evaluation].

PubMed

Chen, Meiling; Tao, Ling; Qian, Zhiyu

2009-08-01

Medical image fusion is of very important value for application in medical image analysis and diagnosis. In this paper, the conventional method of wavelet fusion is improved,so a new algorithm of medical image fusion is presented and the high frequency and low frequency coefficients are studied respectively. When high frequency coefficients are chosen, the regional edge intensities of each sub-image are calculated to realize adaptive fusion. The choice of low frequency coefficient is based on the edges of images, so that the fused image preserves all useful information and appears more distinctly. We apply the conventional and the improved fusion algorithms based on wavelet transform to fuse two images of human body and also evaluate the fusion results through a quality evaluation method. Experimental results show that this algorithm can effectively retain the details of information on original images and enhance their edge and texture features. This new algorithm is better than the conventional fusion algorithm based on wavelet transform.

An underwater turbulence degraded image restoration algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Furhad, Md. Hasan; Tahtali, Murat; Lambert, Andrew

2017-09-01

Underwater turbulence occurs due to random fluctuations of temperature and salinity in the water. These fluctuations are responsible for variations in water density, refractive index and attenuation. These impose random geometric distortions, spatio-temporal varying blur, limited range visibility and limited contrast on the acquired images. There are some restoration techniques developed to address this problem, such as image registration based, lucky region based and centroid-based image restoration algorithms. Although these methods demonstrate better results in terms of removing turbulence, they require computationally intensive image registration, higher CPU load and memory allocations. Thus, in this paper, a simple patch based dictionary learning algorithm is proposed to restore the image by alleviating the costly image registration step. Dictionary learning is a machine learning technique which builds a dictionary of non-zero atoms derived from the sparse representation of an image or signal. The image is divided into several patches and the sharp patches are detected from them. Next, dictionary learning is performed on these patches to estimate the restored image. Finally, an image deconvolution algorithm is employed on the estimated restored image to remove noise that still exists.

A novel image retrieval algorithm based on PHOG and LSH

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wu, Hongliang; Wu, Weimin; Peng, Jiajin; Zhang, Junyuan

2017-08-01

PHOG can describe the local shape of the image and its relationship between the spaces. The using of PHOG algorithm to extract image features in image recognition and retrieval and other aspects have achieved good results. In recent years, locality sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithm has been superior to large-scale data in solving near-nearest neighbor problems compared with traditional algorithms. This paper presents a novel image retrieval algorithm based on PHOG and LSH. First, we use PHOG to extract the feature vector of the image, then use L different LSH hash table to reduce the dimension of PHOG texture to index values and map to different bucket, and finally extract the corresponding value of the image in the bucket for second image retrieval using Manhattan distance. This algorithm can adapt to the massive image retrieval, which ensures the high accuracy of the image retrieval and reduces the time complexity of the retrieval. This algorithm is of great significance.

Steganalysis based on JPEG compatibility

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fridrich, Jessica; Goljan, Miroslav; Du, Rui

2001-11-01

In this paper, we introduce a new forensic tool that can reliably detect modifications in digital images, such as distortion due to steganography and watermarking, in images that were originally stored in the JPEG format. The JPEG compression leave unique fingerprints and serves as a fragile watermark enabling us to detect changes as small as modifying the LSB of one randomly chosen pixel. The detection of changes is based on investigating the compatibility of 8x8 blocks of pixels with JPEG compression with a given quantization matrix. The proposed steganalytic method is applicable to virtually all steganongraphic and watermarking algorithms with the exception of those that embed message bits into the quantized JPEG DCT coefficients. The method can also be used to estimate the size of the secret message and identify the pixels that carry message bits. As a consequence of our steganalysis, we strongly recommend avoiding using images that have been originally stored in the JPEG format as cover-images for spatial-domain steganography.

The optimal algorithm for Multi-source RS image fusion.

PubMed

Fu, Wei; Huang, Shui-Guang; Li, Zeng-Shun; Shen, Hao; Li, Jun-Shuai; Wang, Peng-Yuan

2016-01-01

In order to solve the issue which the fusion rules cannot be self-adaptively adjusted by using available fusion methods according to the subsequent processing requirements of Remote Sensing (RS) image, this paper puts forward GSDA (genetic-iterative self-organizing data analysis algorithm) by integrating the merit of genetic arithmetic together with the advantage of iterative self-organizing data analysis algorithm for multi-source RS image fusion. The proposed algorithm considers the wavelet transform of the translation invariance as the model operator, also regards the contrast pyramid conversion as the observed operator. The algorithm then designs the objective function by taking use of the weighted sum of evaluation indices, and optimizes the objective function by employing GSDA so as to get a higher resolution of RS image. As discussed above, the bullet points of the text are summarized as follows.•The contribution proposes the iterative self-organizing data analysis algorithm for multi-source RS image fusion.•This article presents GSDA algorithm for the self-adaptively adjustment of the fusion rules.•This text comes up with the model operator and the observed operator as the fusion scheme of RS image based on GSDA. The proposed algorithm opens up a novel algorithmic pathway for multi-source RS image fusion by means of GSDA.

Parallel Algorithms for Image Analysis.

DTIC Science & Technology

1982-06-01

8217 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 4. TITLE (aid Subtitle) S. TYPE OF REPORT & PERIOD COVERED PARALLEL ALGORITHMS FOR IMAGE ANALYSIS TECHNICAL 6. PERFORMING O4G. REPORT NUMBER TR-1180...Continue on reverse side it neceesary aid Identlfy by block number) Image processing; image analysis ; parallel processing; cellular computers. 20... IMAGE ANALYSIS TECHNICAL 6. PERFORMING ONG. REPORT NUMBER TR-1180 - 7. AUTHOR(&) S. CONTRACT OR GRANT NUMBER(s) Azriel Rosenfeld AFOSR-77-3271 9

Medical image segmentation using genetic algorithms.

PubMed

Maulik, Ujjwal

2009-03-01

Genetic algorithms (GAs) have been found to be effective in the domain of medical image segmentation, since the problem can often be mapped to one of search in a complex and multimodal landscape. The challenges in medical image segmentation arise due to poor image contrast and artifacts that result in missing or diffuse organ/tissue boundaries. The resulting search space is therefore often noisy with a multitude of local optima. Not only does the genetic algorithmic framework prove to be effective in coming out of local optima, it also brings considerable flexibility into the segmentation procedure. In this paper, an attempt has been made to review the major applications of GAs to the domain of medical image segmentation.

Analysis of image thresholding segmentation algorithms based on swarm intelligence

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Yi; Lu, Kai; Gao, Yinghui; Yang, Bo

2013-03-01

Swarm intelligence-based image thresholding segmentation algorithms are playing an important role in the research field of image segmentation. In this paper, we briefly introduce the theories of four existing image segmentation algorithms based on swarm intelligence including fish swarm algorithm, artificial bee colony, bacteria foraging algorithm and particle swarm optimization. Then some image benchmarks are tested in order to show the differences of the segmentation accuracy, time consumption, convergence and robustness for Salt & Pepper noise and Gaussian noise of these four algorithms. Through these comparisons, this paper gives qualitative analyses for the performance variance of the four algorithms. The conclusions in this paper would give a significant guide for the actual image segmentation.

A copyright protection scheme for digital images based on shuffled singular value decomposition and visual cryptography.

PubMed

Devi, B Pushpa; Singh, Kh Manglem; Roy, Sudipta

2016-01-01

This paper proposes a new watermarking algorithm based on the shuffled singular value decomposition and the visual cryptography for copyright protection of digital images. It generates the ownership and identification shares of the image based on visual cryptography. It decomposes the image into low and high frequency sub-bands. The low frequency sub-band is further divided into blocks of same size after shuffling it and then the singular value decomposition is applied to each randomly selected block. Shares are generated by comparing one of the elements in the first column of the left orthogonal matrix with its corresponding element in the right orthogonal matrix of the singular value decomposition of the block of the low frequency sub-band. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme clearly verifies the copyright of the digital images, and is robust to withstand several image processing attacks. Comparison with the other related visual cryptography-based algorithms reveals that the proposed method gives better performance. The proposed method is especially resilient against the rotation attack.

The influence of image reconstruction algorithms on linear thorax EIT image analysis of ventilation.

PubMed

Zhao, Zhanqi; Frerichs, Inéz; Pulletz, Sven; Müller-Lisse, Ullrich; Möller, Knut

2014-06-01

Analysis methods of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) images based on different reconstruction algorithms were examined. EIT measurements were performed on eight mechanically ventilated patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. A maneuver with step increase of airway pressure was performed. EIT raw data were reconstructed offline with (1) filtered back-projection (BP); (2) the Dräger algorithm based on linearized Newton-Raphson (DR); (3) the GREIT (Graz consensus reconstruction algorithm for EIT) reconstruction algorithm with a circular forward model (GR(C)) and (4) GREIT with individual thorax geometry (GR(T)). Individual thorax contours were automatically determined from the routine computed tomography images. Five indices were calculated on the resulting EIT images respectively: (a) the ratio between tidal and deep inflation impedance changes; (b) tidal impedance changes in the right and left lungs; (c) center of gravity; (d) the global inhomogeneity index and (e) ventilation delay at mid-dorsal regions. No significant differences were found in all examined indices among the four reconstruction algorithms (p > 0.2, Kruskal-Wallis test). The examined algorithms used for EIT image reconstruction do not influence the selected indices derived from the EIT image analysis. Indices that validated for images with one reconstruction algorithm are also valid for other reconstruction algorithms.

Algorithmic support for graphic images rotation in avionics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kniga, E. V.; Gurjanov, A. V.; Shukalov, A. V.; Zharinov, I. O.

2018-05-01

The avionics device designing has an actual problem of development and research algorithms to rotate the images which are being shown in the on-board display. The image rotation algorithms are a part of program software of avionics devices, which are parts of the on-board computers of the airplanes and helicopters. Images to be rotated have the flight location map fragments. The image rotation in the display system can be done as a part of software or mechanically. The program option is worse than the mechanic one in its rotation speed. The comparison of some test images of rotation several algorithms is shown which are being realized mechanically with the program environment Altera QuartusII.

An improved ASIFT algorithm for indoor panorama image matching

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fu, Han; Xie, Donghai; Zhong, Ruofei; Wu, Yu; Wu, Qiong

2017-07-01

The generation of 3D models for indoor objects and scenes is an attractive tool for digital city, virtual reality and SLAM purposes. Panoramic images are becoming increasingly more common in such applications due to their advantages to capture the complete environment in one single image with large field of view. The extraction and matching of image feature points are important and difficult steps in three-dimensional reconstruction, and ASIFT is a state-of-the-art algorithm to implement these functions. Compared with the SIFT algorithm, more feature points can be generated and the matching accuracy of ASIFT algorithm is higher, even for the panoramic images with obvious distortions. However, the algorithm is really time-consuming because of complex operations and performs not very well for some indoor scenes under poor light or without rich textures. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved ASIFT algorithm for indoor panoramic images: firstly, the panoramic images are projected into multiple normal perspective images. Secondly, the original ASIFT algorithm is simplified from the affine transformation of tilt and rotation with the images to the only tilt affine transformation. Finally, the results are re-projected to the panoramic image space. Experiments in different environments show that this method can not only ensure the precision of feature points extraction and matching, but also greatly reduce the computing time.

Halftoning and Image Processing Algorithms

DTIC Science & Technology

1999-02-01

screening techniques with the quality advantages of error diffusion in the half toning of color maps, and on color image enhancement for halftone ...image quality. Our goals in this research were to advance the understanding in image science for our new halftone algorithm and to contribute to...image retrieval and noise theory for such imagery. In the field of color halftone printing, research was conducted on deriving a theoretical model of our

Multiple-algorithm parallel fusion of infrared polarization and intensity images based on algorithmic complementarity and synergy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Lei; Yang, Fengbao; Ji, Linna; Lv, Sheng

2018-01-01

Diverse image fusion methods perform differently. Each method has advantages and disadvantages compared with others. One notion is that the advantages of different image methods can be effectively combined. A multiple-algorithm parallel fusion method based on algorithmic complementarity and synergy is proposed. First, in view of the characteristics of the different algorithms and difference-features among images, an index vector-based feature-similarity is proposed to define the degree of complementarity and synergy. This proposed index vector is a reliable evidence indicator for algorithm selection. Second, the algorithms with a high degree of complementarity and synergy are selected. Then, the different degrees of various features and infrared intensity images are used as the initial weights for the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). This avoids randomness of the NMF initialization parameter. Finally, the fused images of different algorithms are integrated using the NMF because of its excellent data fusing performance on independent features. Experimental results demonstrate that the visual effect and objective evaluation index of the fused images obtained using the proposed method are better than those obtained using traditional methods. The proposed method retains all the advantages that individual fusion algorithms have.

Efficient iterative image reconstruction algorithm for dedicated breast CT

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Antropova, Natalia; Sanchez, Adrian; Reiser, Ingrid S.; Sidky, Emil Y.; Boone, John; Pan, Xiaochuan

2016-03-01

Dedicated breast computed tomography (bCT) is currently being studied as a potential screening method for breast cancer. The X-ray exposure is set low to achieve an average glandular dose comparable to that of mammography, yielding projection data that contains high levels of noise. Iterative image reconstruction (IIR) algorithms may be well-suited for the system since they potentially reduce the effects of noise in the reconstructed images. However, IIR outcomes can be difficult to control since the algorithm parameters do not directly correspond to the image properties. Also, IIR algorithms are computationally demanding and have optimal parameter settings that depend on the size and shape of the breast and positioning of the patient. In this work, we design an efficient IIR algorithm with meaningful parameter specifications and that can be used on a large, diverse sample of bCT cases. The flexibility and efficiency of this method comes from having the final image produced by a linear combination of two separately reconstructed images - one containing gray level information and the other with enhanced high frequency components. Both of the images result from few iterations of separate IIR algorithms. The proposed algorithm depends on two parameters both of which have a well-defined impact on image quality. The algorithm is applied to numerous bCT cases from a dedicated bCT prototype system developed at University of California, Davis.

Fast image matching algorithm based on projection characteristics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhou, Lijuan; Yue, Xiaobo; Zhou, Lijun

2011-06-01

Based on analyzing the traditional template matching algorithm, this paper identified the key factors restricting the speed of matching and put forward a brand new fast matching algorithm based on projection. Projecting the grayscale image, this algorithm converts the two-dimensional information of the image into one-dimensional one, and then matches and identifies through one-dimensional correlation, meanwhile, because of normalization has been done, when the image brightness or signal amplitude increasing in proportion, it could also perform correct matching. Experimental results show that the projection characteristics based image registration method proposed in this article could greatly improve the matching speed, which ensuring the matching accuracy as well.

Hybrid wavefront sensing and image correction algorithm for imaging through turbulent media

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wu, Chensheng; Robertson Rzasa, John; Ko, Jonathan; Davis, Christopher C.

2017-09-01

It is well known that passive image correction of turbulence distortions often involves using geometry-dependent deconvolution algorithms. On the other hand, active imaging techniques using adaptive optic correction should use the distorted wavefront information for guidance. Our work shows that a hybrid hardware-software approach is possible to obtain accurate and highly detailed images through turbulent media. The processing algorithm also takes much fewer iteration steps in comparison with conventional image processing algorithms. In our proposed approach, a plenoptic sensor is used as a wavefront sensor to guide post-stage image correction on a high-definition zoomable camera. Conversely, we show that given the ground truth of the highly detailed image and the plenoptic imaging result, we can generate an accurate prediction of the blurred image on a traditional zoomable camera. Similarly, the ground truth combined with the blurred image from the zoomable camera would provide the wavefront conditions. In application, our hybrid approach can be used as an effective way to conduct object recognition in a turbulent environment where the target has been significantly distorted or is even unrecognizable.

Parallel asynchronous systems and image processing algorithms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Coon, D. D.; Perera, A. G. U.

1989-01-01

A new hardware approach to implementation of image processing algorithms is described. The approach is based on silicon devices which would permit an independent analog processing channel to be dedicated to evey pixel. A laminar architecture consisting of a stack of planar arrays of the device would form a two-dimensional array processor with a 2-D array of inputs located directly behind a focal plane detector array. A 2-D image data stream would propagate in neuronlike asynchronous pulse coded form through the laminar processor. Such systems would integrate image acquisition and image processing. Acquisition and processing would be performed concurrently as in natural vision systems. The research is aimed at implementation of algorithms, such as the intensity dependent summation algorithm and pyramid processing structures, which are motivated by the operation of natural vision systems. Implementation of natural vision algorithms would benefit from the use of neuronlike information coding and the laminar, 2-D parallel, vision system type architecture. Besides providing a neural network framework for implementation of natural vision algorithms, a 2-D parallel approach could eliminate the serial bottleneck of conventional processing systems. Conversion to serial format would occur only after raw intensity data has been substantially processed. An interesting challenge arises from the fact that the mathematical formulation of natural vision algorithms does not specify the means of implementation, so that hardware implementation poses intriguing questions involving vision science.

Robust and Imperceptible Watermarking of Video Streams for Low Power Devices

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ishtiaq, Muhammad; Jaffar, M. Arfan; Khan, Muhammad A.; Jan, Zahoor; Mirza, Anwar M.

With the advent of internet, every aspect of life is going online. From online working to watching videos, everything is now available on the internet. With the greater business benefits, increased availability and other online business advantages, there is a major challenge of security and ownership of data. Videos downloaded from an online store can easily be shared among non-intended or unauthorized users. Invisible watermarking is used to hide copyright protection information in the videos. The existing methods of watermarking are less robust and imperceptible and also the computational complexity of these methods does not suit low power devices. In this paper, we have proposed a new method to address the problem of robustness and imperceptibility. Experiments have shown that our method has better robustness and imperceptibility as well as our method is computationally efficient than previous approaches in practice. Hence our method can easily be applied on low power devices.

Application of the EM algorithm to radiographic images.

PubMed

Brailean, J C; Little, D; Giger, M L; Chen, C T; Sullivan, B J

1992-01-01

The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm has received considerable attention in the area of positron emitted tomography (PET) as a restoration and reconstruction technique. In this paper, the restoration capabilities of the EM algorithm when applied to radiographic images is investigated. This application does not involve reconstruction. The performance of the EM algorithm is quantitatively evaluated using a "perceived" signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as the image quality metric. This perceived SNR is based on statistical decision theory and includes both the observer's visual response function and a noise component internal to the eye-brain system. For a variety of processing parameters, the relative SNR (ratio of the processed SNR to the original SNR) is calculated and used as a metric to compare quantitatively the effects of the EM algorithm with two other image enhancement techniques: global contrast enhancement (windowing) and unsharp mask filtering. The results suggest that the EM algorithm's performance is superior when compared to unsharp mask filtering and global contrast enhancement for radiographic images which contain objects smaller than 4 mm.

Image Registration Algorithm Based on Parallax Constraint and Clustering Analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Zhe; Dong, Min; Mu, Xiaomin; Wang, Song

2018-01-01

To resolve the problem of slow computation speed and low matching accuracy in image registration, a new image registration algorithm based on parallax constraint and clustering analysis is proposed. Firstly, Harris corner detection algorithm is used to extract the feature points of two images. Secondly, use Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC) function to perform the approximate matching of feature points, and the initial feature pair is obtained. Then, according to the parallax constraint condition, the initial feature pair is preprocessed by K-means clustering algorithm, which is used to remove the feature point pairs with obvious errors in the approximate matching process. Finally, adopt Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm to optimize the feature points to obtain the final feature point matching result, and the fast and accurate image registration is realized. The experimental results show that the image registration algorithm proposed in this paper can improve the accuracy of the image matching while ensuring the real-time performance of the algorithm.

Social computing for image matching

PubMed Central

Rivas, Alberto; Sánchez-Torres, Ramiro; Rodríguez, Sara

2018-01-01

One of the main technological trends in the last five years is mass data analysis. This trend is due in part to the emergence of concepts such as social networks, which generate a large volume of data that can provide added value through their analysis. This article is focused on a business and employment-oriented social network. More specifically, it focuses on the analysis of information provided by different users in image form. The images are analyzed to detect whether other existing users have posted or talked about the same image, even if the image has undergone some type of modification such as watermarks or color filters. This makes it possible to establish new connections among unknown users by detecting what they are posting or whether they are talking about the same images. The proposed solution consists of an image matching algorithm, which is based on the rapid calculation and comparison of hashes. However, there is a computationally expensive aspect in charge of revoking possible image transformations. As a result, the image matching process is supported by a distributed forecasting system that enables or disables nodes to serve all the possible requests. The proposed system has shown promising results for matching modified images, especially when compared with other existing systems. PMID:29813082

Microscopic image analysis for reticulocyte based on watershed algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, J. Q.; Liu, G. F.; Liu, J. G.; Wang, G.

2007-12-01

We present a watershed-based algorithm in the analysis of light microscopic image for reticulocyte (RET), which will be used in an automated recognition system for RET in peripheral blood. The original images, obtained by micrography, are segmented by modified watershed algorithm and are recognized in term of gray entropy and area of connective area. In the process of watershed algorithm, judgment conditions are controlled according to character of the image, besides, the segmentation is performed by morphological subtraction. The algorithm was simulated with MATLAB software. It is similar for automated and manual scoring and there is good correlation(r=0.956) between the methods, which is resulted from 50 pieces of RET images. The result indicates that the algorithm for peripheral blood RETs is comparable to conventional manual scoring, and it is superior in objectivity. This algorithm avoids time-consuming calculation such as ultra-erosion and region-growth, which will speed up the computation consequentially.

Image-algebraic design of multispectral target recognition algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schmalz, Mark S.; Ritter, Gerhard X.

1994-06-01

In this paper, we discuss methods for multispectral ATR (Automated Target Recognition) of small targets that are sensed under suboptimal conditions, such as haze, smoke, and low light levels. In particular, we discuss our ongoing development of algorithms and software that effect intelligent object recognition by selecting ATR filter parameters according to ambient conditions. Our algorithms are expressed in terms of IA (image algebra), a concise, rigorous notation that unifies linear and nonlinear mathematics in the image processing domain. IA has been implemented on a variety of parallel computers, with preprocessors available for the Ada and FORTRAN languages. An image algebra C++ class library has recently been made available. Thus, our algorithms are both feasible implementationally and portable to numerous machines. Analyses emphasize the aspects of image algebra that aid the design of multispectral vision algorithms, such as parameterized templates that facilitate the flexible specification of ATR filters.

Capacity is the Wrong Paradigm

DTIC Science & Technology

2002-01-01

short, steganography values detection over ro- bustness, whereas watermarking values robustness over de - tection.) Hiding techniques for JPEG images ...world length of the code. D: If the algorithm is known, this method is trivially de - tectable if we are sending images (with no encryption). If we are...implications of the work of Chaitin and Kolmogorov on algorithmic complex- ity [5]. We have also concentrated on screen images in this paper and have not

Advanced biologically plausible algorithms for low-level image processing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gusakova, Valentina I.; Podladchikova, Lubov N.; Shaposhnikov, Dmitry G.; Markin, Sergey N.; Golovan, Alexander V.; Lee, Seong-Whan

1999-08-01

At present, in computer vision, the approach based on modeling the biological vision mechanisms is extensively developed. However, up to now, real world image processing has no effective solution in frameworks of both biologically inspired and conventional approaches. Evidently, new algorithms and system architectures based on advanced biological motivation should be developed for solution of computational problems related to this visual task. Basic problems that should be solved for creation of effective artificial visual system to process real world imags are a search for new algorithms of low-level image processing that, in a great extent, determine system performance. In the present paper, the result of psychophysical experiments and several advanced biologically motivated algorithms for low-level processing are presented. These algorithms are based on local space-variant filter, context encoding visual information presented in the center of input window, and automatic detection of perceptually important image fragments. The core of latter algorithm are using local feature conjunctions such as noncolinear oriented segment and composite feature map formation. Developed algorithms were integrated into foveal active vision model, the MARR. It is supposed that proposed algorithms may significantly improve model performance while real world image processing during memorizing, search, and recognition.

Target recognition of ladar range images using slice image: comparison of four improved algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xia, Wenze; Han, Shaokun; Cao, Jingya; Wang, Liang; Zhai, Yu; Cheng, Yang

2017-07-01

Compared with traditional 3-D shape data, ladar range images possess properties of strong noise, shape degeneracy, and sparsity, which make feature extraction and representation difficult. The slice image is an effective feature descriptor to resolve this problem. We propose four improved algorithms on target recognition of ladar range images using slice image. In order to improve resolution invariance of the slice image, mean value detection instead of maximum value detection is applied in these four improved algorithms. In order to improve rotation invariance of the slice image, three new improved feature descriptors-which are feature slice image, slice-Zernike moments, and slice-Fourier moments-are applied to the last three improved algorithms, respectively. Backpropagation neural networks are used as feature classifiers in the last two improved algorithms. The performance of these four improved recognition systems is analyzed comprehensively in the aspects of the three invariances, recognition rate, and execution time. The final experiment results show that the improvements for these four algorithms reach the desired effect, the three invariances of feature descriptors are not directly related to the final recognition performance of recognition systems, and these four improved recognition systems have different performances under different conditions.

Multi-limit unsymmetrical MLIBD image restoration algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Yang; Cheng, Yiping; Chen, Zai-wang; Bo, Chen

2012-11-01

A novel multi-limit unsymmetrical iterative blind deconvolution(MLIBD) algorithm was presented to enhance the performance of adaptive optics image restoration.The algorithm enhances the reliability of iterative blind deconvolution by introducing the bandwidth limit into the frequency domain of point spread(PSF),and adopts the PSF dynamic support region estimation to improve the convergence speed.The unsymmetrical factor is automatically computed to advance its adaptivity.Image deconvolution comparing experiments between Richardson-Lucy IBD and MLIBD were done,and the result indicates that the iteration number is reduced by 22.4% and the peak signal-to-noise ratio is improved by 10.18dB with MLIBD method. The performance of MLIBD algorithm is outstanding in the images restoration the FK5-857 adaptive optics and the double-star adaptive optics.

Regularization iteration imaging algorithm for electrical capacitance tomography

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tong, Guowei; Liu, Shi; Chen, Hongyan; Wang, Xueyao

2018-03-01

The image reconstruction method plays a crucial role in real-world applications of the electrical capacitance tomography technique. In this study, a new cost function that simultaneously considers the sparsity and low-rank properties of the imaging targets is proposed to improve the quality of the reconstruction images, in which the image reconstruction task is converted into an optimization problem. Within the framework of the split Bregman algorithm, an iterative scheme that splits a complicated optimization problem into several simpler sub-tasks is developed to solve the proposed cost function efficiently, in which the fast-iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm is introduced to accelerate the convergence. Numerical experiment results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving the reconstruction precision and robustness.

Compressively sampled MR image reconstruction using generalized thresholding iterative algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Elahi, Sana; kaleem, Muhammad; Omer, Hammad

2018-01-01

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging area of interest in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). CS is used for the reconstruction of the images from a very limited number of samples in k-space. This significantly reduces the MRI data acquisition time. One important requirement for signal recovery in CS is the use of an appropriate non-linear reconstruction algorithm. It is a challenging task to choose a reconstruction algorithm that would accurately reconstruct the MR images from the under-sampled k-space data. Various algorithms have been used to solve the system of non-linear equations for better image quality and reconstruction speed in CS. In the recent past, iterative soft thresholding algorithm (ISTA) has been introduced in CS-MRI. This algorithm directly cancels the incoherent artifacts produced because of the undersampling in k -space. This paper introduces an improved iterative algorithm based on p -thresholding technique for CS-MRI image reconstruction. The use of p -thresholding function promotes sparsity in the image which is a key factor for CS based image reconstruction. The p -thresholding based iterative algorithm is a modification of ISTA, and minimizes non-convex functions. It has been shown that the proposed p -thresholding iterative algorithm can be used effectively to recover fully sampled image from the under-sampled data in MRI. The performance of the proposed method is verified using simulated and actual MRI data taken at St. Mary's Hospital, London. The quality of the reconstructed images is measured in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), artifact power (AP), and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). The proposed approach shows improved performance when compared to other iterative algorithms based on log thresholding, soft thresholding and hard thresholding techniques at different reduction factors.

Prototype for Meta-Algorithmic, Content-Aware Image Analysis

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-03-01

PROTOTYPE FOR META-ALGORITHMIC, CONTENT-AWARE IMAGE ANALYSIS UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA MARCH 2015 FINAL TECHNICAL REPORT...ALGORITHMIC, CONTENT-AWARE IMAGE ANALYSIS 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER FA8750-12-C-0181 5b. GRANT NUMBER N/A 5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT NUMBER 62305E 6. AUTHOR(S) S...approaches were studied in detail and their results on a sample dataset are presented. 15. SUBJECT TERMS Image Analysis , Computer Vision, Content

A Stereo Dual-Channel Dynamic Programming Algorithm for UAV Image Stitching.

PubMed

Li, Ming; Chen, Ruizhi; Zhang, Weilong; Li, Deren; Liao, Xuan; Wang, Lei; Pan, Yuanjin; Zhang, Peng

2017-09-08

Dislocation is one of the major challenges in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image stitching. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for seamlessly stitching UAV images based on a dynamic programming approach. Our solution consists of two steps: Firstly, an image matching algorithm is used to correct the images so that they are in the same coordinate system. Secondly, a new dynamic programming algorithm is developed based on the concept of a stereo dual-channel energy accumulation. A new energy aggregation and traversal strategy is adopted in our solution, which can find a more optimal seam line for image stitching. Our algorithm overcomes the theoretical limitation of the classical Duplaquet algorithm. Experiments show that the algorithm can effectively solve the dislocation problem in UAV image stitching, especially for the cases in dense urban areas. Our solution is also direction-independent, which has better adaptability and robustness for stitching images.

LSB Based Quantum Image Steganography Algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiang, Nan; Zhao, Na; Wang, Luo

2016-01-01

Quantum steganography is the technique which hides a secret message into quantum covers such as quantum images. In this paper, two blind LSB steganography algorithms in the form of quantum circuits are proposed based on the novel enhanced quantum representation (NEQR) for quantum images. One algorithm is plain LSB which uses the message bits to substitute for the pixels' LSB directly. The other is block LSB which embeds a message bit into a number of pixels that belong to one image block. The extracting circuits can regain the secret message only according to the stego cover. Analysis and simulation-based experimental results demonstrate that the invisibility is good, and the balance between the capacity and the robustness can be adjusted according to the needs of applications.

Research on the Improved Image Dodging Algorithm Based on Mask Technique

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yao, F.; Hu, H.; Wan, Y.

2012-08-01

The remote sensing image dodging algorithm based on Mask technique is a good method for removing the uneven lightness within a single image. However, there are some problems with this algorithm, such as how to set an appropriate filter size, for which there is no good solution. In order to solve these problems, an improved algorithm is proposed. In this improved algorithm, the original image is divided into blocks, and then the image blocks with different definitions are smoothed using the low-pass filters with different cut-off frequencies to get the background image; for the image after subtraction, the regions with different lightness are processed using different linear transformation models. The improved algorithm can get a better dodging result than the original one, and can make the contrast of the whole image more consistent.

An improved dehazing algorithm of aerial high-definition image

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiang, Wentao; Ji, Ming; Huang, Xiying; Wang, Chao; Yang, Yizhou; Li, Tao; Wang, Jiaoying; Zhang, Ying

2016-01-01

For unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) images, the sensor can not get high quality images due to fog and haze weather. To solve this problem, An improved dehazing algorithm of aerial high-definition image is proposed. Based on the model of dark channel prior, the new algorithm firstly extracts the edges from crude estimated transmission map and expands the extracted edges. Then according to the expended edges, the algorithm sets a threshold value to divide the crude estimated transmission map into different areas and makes different guided filter on the different areas compute the optimized transmission map. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is substantially the same as the one based on dark channel prior and guided filter. The average computation time of the new algorithm is around 40% of the one as well as the detection ability of UAV image is improved effectively in fog and haze weather.

Designing robust watermark barcodes for multiplex long-read sequencing.

PubMed

Ezpeleta, Joaquín; Krsticevic, Flavia J; Bulacio, Pilar; Tapia, Elizabeth

2017-03-15

To attain acceptable sample misassignment rates, current approaches to multiplex single-molecule real-time sequencing require upstream quality improvement, which is obtained from multiple passes over the sequenced insert and significantly reduces the effective read length. In order to fully exploit the raw read length on multiplex applications, robust barcodes capable of dealing with the full single-pass error rates are needed. We present a method for designing sequencing barcodes that can withstand a large number of insertion, deletion and substitution errors and are suitable for use in multiplex single-molecule real-time sequencing. The manuscript focuses on the design of barcodes for full-length single-pass reads, impaired by challenging error rates in the order of 11%. The proposed barcodes can multiplex hundreds or thousands of samples while achieving sample misassignment probabilities as low as 10-7 under the above conditions, and are designed to be compatible with chemical constraints imposed by the sequencing process. Software tools for constructing watermark barcode sets and demultiplexing barcoded reads, together with example sets of barcodes and synthetic barcoded reads, are freely available at www.cifasis-conicet.gov.ar/ezpeleta/NS-watermark . ezpeleta@cifasis-conicet.gov.ar. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

SAR image registration based on Susan algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Chun-bo; Fu, Shao-hua; Wei, Zhong-yi

2011-10-01

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active remote sensing system which can be installed on aircraft, satellite and other carriers with the advantages of all day and night and all-weather ability. It is the important problem that how to deal with SAR and extract information reasonably and efficiently. Particularly SAR image geometric correction is the bottleneck to impede the application of SAR. In this paper we introduces image registration and the Susan algorithm knowledge firstly, then introduces the process of SAR image registration based on Susan algorithm and finally presents experimental results of SAR image registration. The Experiment shows that this method is effective and applicable, no matter from calculating the time or from the calculation accuracy.

A Stereo Dual-Channel Dynamic Programming Algorithm for UAV Image Stitching

PubMed Central

Chen, Ruizhi; Zhang, Weilong; Li, Deren; Liao, Xuan; Zhang, Peng

2017-01-01

Dislocation is one of the major challenges in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image stitching. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for seamlessly stitching UAV images based on a dynamic programming approach. Our solution consists of two steps: Firstly, an image matching algorithm is used to correct the images so that they are in the same coordinate system. Secondly, a new dynamic programming algorithm is developed based on the concept of a stereo dual-channel energy accumulation. A new energy aggregation and traversal strategy is adopted in our solution, which can find a more optimal seam line for image stitching. Our algorithm overcomes the theoretical limitation of the classical Duplaquet algorithm. Experiments show that the algorithm can effectively solve the dislocation problem in UAV image stitching, especially for the cases in dense urban areas. Our solution is also direction-independent, which has better adaptability and robustness for stitching images. PMID:28885547

Study on Underwater Image Denoising Algorithm Based on Wavelet Transform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jian, Sun; Wen, Wang

2017-02-01

This paper analyzes the application of MATLAB in underwater image processing, the transmission characteristics of the underwater laser light signal and the kinds of underwater noise has been described, the common noise suppression algorithm: Wiener filter, median filter, average filter algorithm is brought out. Then the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm in image sharpness and edge protection areas have been compared. A hybrid filter algorithm based on wavelet transform has been proposed which can be used for Color Image Denoising. At last the PSNR and NMSE of each algorithm has been given out, which compares the ability to de-noising

Image reconstruction through thin scattering media by simulated annealing algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fang, Longjie; Zuo, Haoyi; Pang, Lin; Yang, Zuogang; Zhang, Xicheng; Zhu, Jianhua

2018-07-01

An idea for reconstructing the image of an object behind thin scattering media is proposed by phase modulation. The optimized phase mask is achieved by modulating the scattered light using simulated annealing algorithm. The correlation coefficient is exploited as a fitness function to evaluate the quality of reconstructed image. The reconstructed images optimized from simulated annealing algorithm and genetic algorithm are compared in detail. The experimental results show that our proposed method has better definition and higher speed than genetic algorithm.

Large-scale image region documentation for fully automated image biomarker algorithm development and evaluation.

PubMed

Reeves, Anthony P; Xie, Yiting; Liu, Shuang

2017-04-01

With the advent of fully automated image analysis and modern machine learning methods, there is a need for very large image datasets having documented segmentations for both computer algorithm training and evaluation. This paper presents a method and implementation for facilitating such datasets that addresses the critical issue of size scaling for algorithm validation and evaluation; current evaluation methods that are usually used in academic studies do not scale to large datasets. This method includes protocols for the documentation of many regions in very large image datasets; the documentation may be incrementally updated by new image data and by improved algorithm outcomes. This method has been used for 5 years in the context of chest health biomarkers from low-dose chest CT images that are now being used with increasing frequency in lung cancer screening practice. The lung scans are segmented into over 100 different anatomical regions, and the method has been applied to a dataset of over 20,000 chest CT images. Using this framework, the computer algorithms have been developed to achieve over 90% acceptable image segmentation on the complete dataset.

Spatial compression algorithm for the analysis of very large multivariate images

DOEpatents

Keenan, Michael R [Albuquerque, NM

2008-07-15

A method for spatially compressing data sets enables the efficient analysis of very large multivariate images. The spatial compression algorithms use a wavelet transformation to map an image into a compressed image containing a smaller number of pixels that retain the original image's information content. Image analysis can then be performed on a compressed data matrix consisting of a reduced number of significant wavelet coefficients. Furthermore, a block algorithm can be used for performing common operations more efficiently. The spatial compression algorithms can be combined with spectral compression algorithms to provide further computational efficiencies.

Filtered gradient reconstruction algorithm for compressive spectral imaging

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mejia, Yuri; Arguello, Henry

2017-04-01

Compressive sensing matrices are traditionally based on random Gaussian and Bernoulli entries. Nevertheless, they are subject to physical constraints, and their structure unusually follows a dense matrix distribution, such as the case of the matrix related to compressive spectral imaging (CSI). The CSI matrix represents the integration of coded and shifted versions of the spectral bands. A spectral image can be recovered from CSI measurements by using iterative algorithms for linear inverse problems that minimize an objective function including a quadratic error term combined with a sparsity regularization term. However, current algorithms are slow because they do not exploit the structure and sparse characteristics of the CSI matrices. A gradient-based CSI reconstruction algorithm, which introduces a filtering step in each iteration of a conventional CSI reconstruction algorithm that yields improved image quality, is proposed. Motivated by the structure of the CSI matrix, Φ, this algorithm modifies the iterative solution such that it is forced to converge to a filtered version of the residual ΦTy, where y is the compressive measurement vector. We show that the filtered-based algorithm converges to better quality performance results than the unfiltered version. Simulation results highlight the relative performance gain over the existing iterative algorithms.

Image-processing algorithms for inspecting characteristics of hybrid rice seed

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cheng, Fang; Ying, Yibin

2004-03-01

Incompletely closed glumes, germ and disease are three characteristics of hybrid rice seed. Image-processing algorithms developed to detect these seed characteristics were presented in this paper. The rice seed used for this study involved five varieties of Jinyou402, Shanyou10, Zhongyou207, Jiayou and IIyou. The algorithms were implemented with a 5*600 images set, a 4*400 images set and the other 5*600 images set respectively. The image sets included black background images, white background images and both sides images of rice seed. Results show that the algorithm for inspecting seeds with incompletely closed glumes based on Radon Transform achieved an accuracy of 96% for normal seeds, 92% for seeds with fine fissure and 87% for seeds with unclosed glumes, the algorithm for inspecting germinated seeds on panicle based on PCA and ANN achieved n average accuracy of 98% for normal seeds, 88% for germinated seeds on panicle and the algorithm for inspecting diseased seeds based on color features achieved an accuracy of 92% for normal and healthy seeds, 95% for spot diseased seeds and 83% for severe diseased seeds.

Optimization of image processing algorithms on mobile platforms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Poudel, Pramod; Shirvaikar, Mukul

2011-03-01

This work presents a technique to optimize popular image processing algorithms on mobile platforms such as cell phones, net-books and personal digital assistants (PDAs). The increasing demand for video applications like context-aware computing on mobile embedded systems requires the use of computationally intensive image processing algorithms. The system engineer has a mandate to optimize them so as to meet real-time deadlines. A methodology to take advantage of the asymmetric dual-core processor, which includes an ARM and a DSP core supported by shared memory, is presented with implementation details. The target platform chosen is the popular OMAP 3530 processor for embedded media systems. It has an asymmetric dual-core architecture with an ARM Cortex-A8 and a TMS320C64x Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The development platform was the BeagleBoard with 256 MB of NAND RAM and 256 MB SDRAM memory. The basic image correlation algorithm is chosen for benchmarking as it finds widespread application for various template matching tasks such as face-recognition. The basic algorithm prototypes conform to OpenCV, a popular computer vision library. OpenCV algorithms can be easily ported to the ARM core which runs a popular operating system such as Linux or Windows CE. However, the DSP is architecturally more efficient at handling DFT algorithms. The algorithms are tested on a variety of images and performance results are presented measuring the speedup obtained due to dual-core implementation. A major advantage of this approach is that it allows the ARM processor to perform important real-time tasks, while the DSP addresses performance-hungry algorithms.

Speech watermarking: an approach for the forensic analysis of digital telephonic recordings.

PubMed

Faundez-Zanuy, Marcos; Lucena-Molina, Jose J; Hagmüller, Martin

2010-07-01

In this article, the authors discuss the problem of forensic authentication of digital audio recordings. Although forensic audio has been addressed in several articles, the existing approaches are focused on analog magnetic recordings, which are less prevalent because of the large amount of digital recorders available on the market (optical, solid state, hard disks, etc.). An approach based on digital signal processing that consists of spread spectrum techniques for speech watermarking is presented. This approach presents the advantage that the authentication is based on the signal itself rather than the recording format. Thus, it is valid for usual recording devices in police-controlled telephone intercepts. In addition, our proposal allows for the introduction of relevant information such as the recording date and time and all the relevant data (this is not always possible with classical systems). Our experimental results reveal that the speech watermarking procedure does not interfere in a significant way with the posterior forensic speaker identification.

Double regions growing algorithm for automated satellite image mosaicking

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tan, Yihua; Chen, Chen; Tian, Jinwen

2011-12-01

Feathering is a most widely used method in seamless satellite image mosaicking. A simple but effective algorithm - double regions growing (DRG) algorithm, which utilizes the shape content of images' valid regions, is proposed for generating robust feathering-line before feathering. It works without any human intervention, and experiment on real satellite images shows the advantages of the proposed method.

An improved algorithm of mask image dodging for aerial image

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Zuxun; Zou, Songbai; Zuo, Zhiqi

2011-12-01

The technology of Mask image dodging based on Fourier transform is a good algorithm in removing the uneven luminance within a single image. At present, the difference method and the ratio method are the methods in common use, but they both have their own defects .For example, the difference method can keep the brightness uniformity of the whole image, but it is deficient in local contrast; meanwhile the ratio method can work better in local contrast, but sometimes it makes the dark areas of the original image too bright. In order to remove the defects of the two methods effectively, this paper on the basis of research of the two methods proposes a balance solution. Experiments show that the scheme not only can combine the advantages of the difference method and the ratio method, but also can avoid the deficiencies of the two algorithms.

A fast global fitting algorithm for fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy based on image segmentation.

PubMed

Pelet, S; Previte, M J R; Laiho, L H; So, P T C

2004-10-01

Global fitting algorithms have been shown to improve effectively the accuracy and precision of the analysis of fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy data. Global analysis performs better than unconstrained data fitting when prior information exists, such as the spatial invariance of the lifetimes of individual fluorescent species. The highly coupled nature of global analysis often results in a significantly slower convergence of the data fitting algorithm as compared with unconstrained analysis. Convergence speed can be greatly accelerated by providing appropriate initial guesses. Realizing that the image morphology often correlates with fluorophore distribution, a global fitting algorithm has been developed to assign initial guesses throughout an image based on a segmentation analysis. This algorithm was tested on both simulated data sets and time-domain lifetime measurements. We have successfully measured fluorophore distribution in fibroblasts stained with Hoechst and calcein. This method further allows second harmonic generation from collagen and elastin autofluorescence to be differentiated in fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy images of ex vivo human skin. On our experimental measurement, this algorithm increased convergence speed by over two orders of magnitude and achieved significantly better fits. Copyright 2004 Biophysical Society

Secure and Efficient Transmission of Hyperspectral Images for Geosciences Applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Carpentieri, Bruno; Pizzolante, Raffaele

2017-12-01

Hyperspectral images are acquired through air-borne or space-borne special cameras (sensors) that collect information coming from the electromagnetic spectrum of the observed terrains. Hyperspectral remote sensing and hyperspectral images are used for a wide range of purposes: originally, they were developed for mining applications and for geology because of the capability of this kind of images to correctly identify various types of underground minerals by analysing the reflected spectrums, but their usage has spread in other application fields, such as ecology, military and surveillance, historical research and even archaeology. The large amount of data obtained by the hyperspectral sensors, the fact that these images are acquired at a high cost by air-borne sensors and that they are generally transmitted to a base, makes it necessary to provide an efficient and secure transmission protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that allows secure and efficient transmission of hyperspectral images, by combining a reversible invisible watermarking scheme, used in conjunction with digital signature techniques, and a state-of-art predictive-based lossless compression algorithm.

Large-scale image region documentation for fully automated image biomarker algorithm development and evaluation

PubMed Central

Reeves, Anthony P.; Xie, Yiting; Liu, Shuang

2017-01-01

Abstract. With the advent of fully automated image analysis and modern machine learning methods, there is a need for very large image datasets having documented segmentations for both computer algorithm training and evaluation. This paper presents a method and implementation for facilitating such datasets that addresses the critical issue of size scaling for algorithm validation and evaluation; current evaluation methods that are usually used in academic studies do not scale to large datasets. This method includes protocols for the documentation of many regions in very large image datasets; the documentation may be incrementally updated by new image data and by improved algorithm outcomes. This method has been used for 5 years in the context of chest health biomarkers from low-dose chest CT images that are now being used with increasing frequency in lung cancer screening practice. The lung scans are segmented into over 100 different anatomical regions, and the method has been applied to a dataset of over 20,000 chest CT images. Using this framework, the computer algorithms have been developed to achieve over 90% acceptable image segmentation on the complete dataset. PMID:28612037

Novel approach for image skeleton and distance transformation parallel algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Qing, Kent P.; Means, Robert W.

1994-05-01

Image Understanding is more important in medical imaging than ever, particularly where real-time automatic inspection, screening and classification systems are installed. Skeleton and distance transformations are among the common operations that extract useful information from binary images and aid in Image Understanding. The distance transformation describes the objects in an image by labeling every pixel in each object with the distance to its nearest boundary. The skeleton algorithm starts from the distance transformation and finds the set of pixels that have a locally maximum label. The distance algorithm has to scan the entire image several times depending on the object width. For each pixel, the algorithm must access the neighboring pixels and find the maximum distance from the nearest boundary. It is a computational and memory access intensive procedure. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel approach to the distance transform and skeleton algorithms using the latest VLSI high- speed convolutional chips such as HNC's ViP. The algorithm speed is dependent on the object's width and takes (k + [(k-1)/3]) * 7 milliseconds for a 512 X 512 image with k being the maximum distance of the largest object. All objects in the image will be skeletonized at the same time in parallel.

Performance evaluation of TDT soil water content and watermark soil water potential sensors

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

This study evaluated the performance of digitized Time Domain Transmissometry (TDT) soil water content sensors (Acclima, Inc., Meridian, ID) and resistance-based soil water potential sensors (Watermark 200, Irrometer Company, Inc., Riverside, CA) in two soils. The evaluation was performed by compar...

Accounting for hardware imperfections in EIT image reconstruction algorithms.

PubMed

Hartinger, Alzbeta E; Gagnon, Hervé; Guardo, Robert

2007-07-01

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive technique for imaging the conductivity distribution of a body section. Different types of EIT images can be reconstructed: absolute, time difference and frequency difference. Reconstruction algorithms are sensitive to many errors which translate into image artefacts. These errors generally result from incorrect modelling or inaccurate measurements. Every reconstruction algorithm incorporates a model of the physical set-up which must be as accurate as possible since any discrepancy with the actual set-up will cause image artefacts. Several methods have been proposed in the literature to improve the model realism, such as creating anatomical-shaped meshes, adding a complete electrode model and tracking changes in electrode contact impedances and positions. Absolute and frequency difference reconstruction algorithms are particularly sensitive to measurement errors and generally assume that measurements are made with an ideal EIT system. Real EIT systems have hardware imperfections that cause measurement errors. These errors translate into image artefacts since the reconstruction algorithm cannot properly discriminate genuine measurement variations produced by the medium under study from those caused by hardware imperfections. We therefore propose a method for eliminating these artefacts by integrating a model of the system hardware imperfections into the reconstruction algorithms. The effectiveness of the method has been evaluated by reconstructing absolute, time difference and frequency difference images with and without the hardware model from data acquired on a resistor mesh phantom. Results have shown that artefacts are smaller for images reconstructed with the model, especially for frequency difference imaging.

Lossless data embedding for all image formats

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fridrich, Jessica; Goljan, Miroslav; Du, Rui

2002-04-01

Lossless data embedding has the property that the distortion due to embedding can be completely removed from the watermarked image without accessing any side channel. This can be a very important property whenever serious concerns over the image quality and artifacts visibility arise, such as for medical images, due to legal reasons, for military images or images used as evidence in court that may be viewed after enhancement and zooming. We formulate two general methodologies for lossless embedding that can be applied to images as well as any other digital objects, including video, audio, and other structures with redundancy. We use the general principles as guidelines for designing efficient, simple, and high-capacity lossless embedding methods for three most common image format paradigms - raw, uncompressed formats (BMP), lossy or transform formats (JPEG), and palette formats (GIF, PNG). We close the paper with examples of how the concept of lossless data embedding can be used as a powerful tool to achieve a variety of non-trivial tasks, including elegant lossless authentication using fragile watermarks. Note on terminology: some authors coined the terms erasable, removable, reversible, invertible, and distortion-free for the same concept.

An Example-Based Super-Resolution Algorithm for Selfie Images

PubMed Central

William, Jino Hans; Venkateswaran, N.; Narayanan, Srinath; Ramachandran, Sandeep

2016-01-01

A selfie is typically a self-portrait captured using the front camera of a smartphone. Most state-of-the-art smartphones are equipped with a high-resolution (HR) rear camera and a low-resolution (LR) front camera. As selfies are captured by front camera with limited pixel resolution, the fine details in it are explicitly missed. This paper aims to improve the resolution of selfies by exploiting the fine details in HR images captured by rear camera using an example-based super-resolution (SR) algorithm. HR images captured by rear camera carry significant fine details and are used as an exemplar to train an optimal matrix-value regression (MVR) operator. The MVR operator serves as an image-pair priori which learns the correspondence between the LR-HR patch-pairs and is effectively used to super-resolve LR selfie images. The proposed MVR algorithm avoids vectorization of image patch-pairs and preserves image-level information during both learning and recovering process. The proposed algorithm is evaluated for its efficiency and effectiveness both qualitatively and quantitatively with other state-of-the-art SR algorithms. The results validate that the proposed algorithm is efficient as it requires less than 3 seconds to super-resolve LR selfie and is effective as it preserves sharp details without introducing any counterfeit fine details. PMID:27064500

Watermarking -- Paving the Way for Better Released Documents

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Little, Keith; Carole, Miller; Schwindt, Paul; Zimmerman, Cheryl

2011-01-01

One of the biggest issues with regard to Released Documentation is making sure what you are looking at is. in fact. what you think it is. Is it Released or Not? Is it the Latest? How to be sure? In this brief session, we'll discuss the path Kennedy Space Center has taken in implementing Watermarking with ProductView . We'11 cover the premise, challenges, and implementation from our windchill 9.1 environment. Come join us and see if we can't save you some time and headaches in the long-run.

Real-time image-processing algorithm for markerless tumour tracking using X-ray fluoroscopic imaging.

PubMed

Mori, S

2014-05-01

To ensure accuracy in respiratory-gating treatment, X-ray fluoroscopic imaging is used to detect tumour position in real time. Detection accuracy is strongly dependent on image quality, particularly positional differences between the patient and treatment couch. We developed a new algorithm to improve the quality of images obtained in X-ray fluoroscopic imaging and report the preliminary results. Two oblique X-ray fluoroscopic images were acquired using a dynamic flat panel detector (DFPD) for two patients with lung cancer. The weighting factor was applied to the DFPD image in respective columns, because most anatomical structures, as well as the treatment couch and port cover edge, were aligned in the superior-inferior direction when the patient lay on the treatment couch. The weighting factors for the respective columns were varied until the standard deviation of the pixel values within the image region was minimized. Once the weighting factors were calculated, the quality of the DFPD image was improved by applying the factors to multiframe images. Applying the image-processing algorithm produced substantial improvement in the quality of images, and the image contrast was increased. The treatment couch and irradiation port edge, which were not related to a patient's position, were removed. The average image-processing time was 1.1 ms, showing that this fast image processing can be applied to real-time tumour-tracking systems. These findings indicate that this image-processing algorithm improves the image quality in patients with lung cancer and successfully removes objects not related to the patient. Our image-processing algorithm might be useful in improving gated-treatment accuracy.

Sensitivity study of voxel-based PET image comparison to image registration algorithms

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Yip, Stephen, E-mail: syip@lroc.harvard.edu; Chen, Aileen B.; Berbeco, Ross

2014-11-01

Purpose: Accurate deformable registration is essential for voxel-based comparison of sequential positron emission tomography (PET) images for proper adaptation of treatment plan and treatment response assessment. The comparison may be sensitive to the method of deformable registration as the optimal algorithm is unknown. This study investigated the impact of registration algorithm choice on therapy response evaluation. Methods: Sixteen patients with 20 lung tumors underwent a pre- and post-treatment computed tomography (CT) and 4D FDG-PET scans before and after chemoradiotherapy. All CT images were coregistered using a rigid and ten deformable registration algorithms. The resulting transformations were then applied to themore » respective PET images. Moreover, the tumor region defined by a physician on the registered PET images was classified into progressor, stable-disease, and responder subvolumes. Particularly, voxels with standardized uptake value (SUV) decreases >30% were classified as responder, while voxels with SUV increases >30% were progressor. All other voxels were considered stable-disease. The agreement of the subvolumes resulting from difference registration algorithms was assessed by Dice similarity index (DSI). Coefficient of variation (CV) was computed to assess variability of DSI between individual tumors. Root mean square difference (RMS{sub rigid}) of the rigidly registered CT images was used to measure the degree of tumor deformation. RMS{sub rigid} and DSI were correlated by Spearman correlation coefficient (R) to investigate the effect of tumor deformation on DSI. Results: Median DSI{sub rigid} was found to be 72%, 66%, and 80%, for progressor, stable-disease, and responder, respectively. Median DSI{sub deformable} was 63%–84%, 65%–81%, and 82%–89%. Variability of DSI was substantial and similar for both rigid and deformable algorithms with CV > 10% for all subvolumes. Tumor deformation had moderate to significant impact on DSI for

Ridge-branch-based blood vessel detection algorithm for multimodal retinal images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Y.; Hutchings, N.; Knighton, R. W.; Gregori, G.; Lujan, B. J.; Flanagan, J. G.

2009-02-01

Automatic detection of retinal blood vessels is important to medical diagnoses and imaging. With the development of imaging technologies, various modals of retinal images are available. Few of currently published algorithms are applied to multimodal retinal images. Besides, the performance of algorithms with pathologies is expected to be improved. The purpose of this paper is to propose an automatic Ridge-Branch-Based (RBB) detection algorithm of blood vessel centerlines and blood vessels for multimodal retinal images (color fundus photographs, fluorescein angiograms, fundus autofluorescence images, SLO fundus images and OCT fundus images, for example). Ridges, which can be considered as centerlines of vessel-like patterns, are first extracted. The method uses the connective branching information of image ridges: if ridge pixels are connected, they are more likely to be in the same class, vessel ridge pixels or non-vessel ridge pixels. Thanks to the good distinguishing ability of the designed "Segment-Based Ridge Features", the classifier and its parameters can be easily adapted to multimodal retinal images without ground truth training. We present thorough experimental results on SLO images, color fundus photograph database and other multimodal retinal images, as well as comparison between other published algorithms. Results showed that the RBB algorithm achieved a good performance.

Segmentation of MRI Brain Images with an Improved Harmony Searching Algorithm.

PubMed

Yang, Zhang; Shufan, Ye; Li, Guo; Weifeng, Ding

2016-01-01

The harmony searching (HS) algorithm is a kind of optimization search algorithm currently applied in many practical problems. The HS algorithm constantly revises variables in the harmony database and the probability of different values that can be used to complete iteration convergence to achieve the optimal effect. Accordingly, this study proposed a modified algorithm to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. First, a rough set algorithm was employed to improve the convergence and accuracy of the HS algorithm. Then, the optimal value was obtained using the improved HS algorithm. The optimal value of convergence was employed as the initial value of the fuzzy clustering algorithm for segmenting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain images. Experimental results showed that the improved HS algorithm attained better convergence and more accurate results than those of the original HS algorithm. In our study, the MRI image segmentation effect of the improved algorithm was superior to that of the original fuzzy clustering method.

Segmentation of MRI Brain Images with an Improved Harmony Searching Algorithm

PubMed Central

Yang, Zhang; Li, Guo; Weifeng, Ding

2016-01-01

The harmony searching (HS) algorithm is a kind of optimization search algorithm currently applied in many practical problems. The HS algorithm constantly revises variables in the harmony database and the probability of different values that can be used to complete iteration convergence to achieve the optimal effect. Accordingly, this study proposed a modified algorithm to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. First, a rough set algorithm was employed to improve the convergence and accuracy of the HS algorithm. Then, the optimal value was obtained using the improved HS algorithm. The optimal value of convergence was employed as the initial value of the fuzzy clustering algorithm for segmenting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain images. Experimental results showed that the improved HS algorithm attained better convergence and more accurate results than those of the original HS algorithm. In our study, the MRI image segmentation effect of the improved algorithm was superior to that of the original fuzzy clustering method. PMID:27403428

Restoration of motion blurred image with Lucy-Richardson algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Jing; Liu, Zhao Hui; Zhou, Liang

2015-10-01

Images will be blurred by relative motion between the camera and the object of interest. In this paper, we analyzed the process of motion-blurred image, and demonstrated a restoration method based on Lucy-Richardson algorithm. The blur extent and angle can be estimated by Radon transform algorithm and auto-correlation function, respectively, and then the point spread function (PSF) of the motion-blurred image can be obtained. Thus with the help of the obtained PSF, the Lucy-Richardson restoration algorithm is used for experimental analysis on the motion-blurred images that have different blur extents, spatial resolutions and signal-to-noise ratios (SNR's). Further, its effectiveness is also evaluated by structural similarity (SSIM). Further studies show that, at first, for the image with a spatial frequency of 0.2 per pixel, the modulation transfer function (MTF) of the restored images can maintains above 0.7 when the blur extent is no bigger than 13 pixels. That means the method compensates low frequency information of the image, while attenuates high frequency information. At second, we fund that the method is more effective on condition that the product of the blur extent and spatial frequency is smaller than 3.75. Finally, the Lucy-Richardson algorithm is found insensitive to the Gaussian noise (of which the variance is not bigger than 0.1) by calculating the MTF of the restored image.

Statistical Signal Models and Algorithms for Image Analysis

DTIC Science & Technology

1984-10-25

In this report, two-dimensional stochastic linear models are used in developing algorithms for image analysis such as classification, segmentation, and object detection in images characterized by textured backgrounds. These models generate two-dimensional random processes as outputs to which statistical inference procedures can naturally be applied. A common thread throughout our algorithms is the interpretation of the inference procedures in terms of linear prediction

Fast algorithm of low power image reformation for OLED display

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lee, Myungwoo; Kim, Taewhan

2014-04-01

We propose a fast algorithm of low-power image reformation for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. The proposed algorithm scales the image histogram in a way to reduce power consumption in OLED display by remapping the gray levels of the pixels in the image based on the fast analysis of the histogram of the input image while maintaining contrast of the image. The key idea is that a large number of gray levels are never used in the images and these gray levels can be effectively exploited to reduce power consumption. On the other hand, to maintain the image contrast the gray level remapping is performed by taking into account the object size in the image to which each gray level is applied, that is, reforming little for the gray levels in the objects of large size. Through experiments with 24 Kodak images, it is shown that our proposed algorithm is able to reduce the power consumption by 10% even with 9% contrast enhancement. Our algorithm runs in a linear time so that it can be applied to moving pictures with high resolution.

Image quality evaluation of full reference algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

He, Nannan; Xie, Kai; Li, Tong; Ye, Yushan

2018-03-01

Image quality evaluation is a classic research topic, the goal is to design the algorithm, given the subjective feelings consistent with the evaluation value. This paper mainly introduces several typical reference methods of Mean Squared Error(MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Rate(PSNR), Structural Similarity Image Metric(SSIM) and feature similarity(FSIM) of objective evaluation methods. The different evaluation methods are tested by Matlab, and the advantages and disadvantages of these methods are obtained by analyzing and comparing them.MSE and PSNR are simple, but they are not considered to introduce HVS characteristics into image quality evaluation. The evaluation result is not ideal. SSIM has a good correlation and simple calculation ,because it is considered to the human visual effect into image quality evaluation,However the SSIM method is based on a hypothesis,The evaluation result is limited. The FSIM method can be used for test of gray image and color image test, and the result is better. Experimental results show that the new image quality evaluation algorithm based on FSIM is more accurate.

Algorithm for Detecting a Bright Spot in an Image

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2009-01-01

An algorithm processes the pixel intensities of a digitized image to detect and locate a circular bright spot, the approximate size of which is known in advance. The algorithm is used to find images of the Sun in cameras aboard the Mars Exploration Rovers. (The images are used in estimating orientations of the Rovers relative to the direction to the Sun.) The algorithm can also be adapted to tracking of circular shaped bright targets in other diverse applications. The first step in the algorithm is to calculate a dark-current ramp a correction necessitated by the scheme that governs the readout of pixel charges in the charge-coupled-device camera in the original Mars Exploration Rover application. In this scheme, the fraction of each frame period during which dark current is accumulated in a given pixel (and, hence, the dark-current contribution to the pixel image-intensity reading) is proportional to the pixel row number. For the purpose of the algorithm, the dark-current contribution to the intensity reading from each pixel is assumed to equal the average of intensity readings from all pixels in the same row, and the factor of proportionality is estimated on the basis of this assumption. Then the product of the row number and the factor of proportionality is subtracted from the reading from each pixel to obtain a dark-current-corrected intensity reading. The next step in the algorithm is to determine the best location, within the overall image, for a window of N N pixels (where N is an odd number) large enough to contain the bright spot of interest plus a small margin. (In the original application, the overall image contains 1,024 by 1,024 pixels, the image of the Sun is about 22 pixels in diameter, and N is chosen to be 29.)

A segmentation algorithm based on image projection for complex text layout

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhu, Wangsheng; Chen, Qin; Wei, Chuanyi; Li, Ziyang

2017-10-01

Segmentation algorithm is an important part of layout analysis, considering the efficiency advantage of the top-down approach and the particularity of the object, a breakdown of projection layout segmentation algorithm. Firstly, the algorithm will algorithm first partitions the text image, and divided into several columns, then for each column scanning projection, the text image is divided into several sub regions through multiple projection. The experimental results show that, this method inherits the projection itself and rapid calculation speed, but also can avoid the effect of arc image information page segmentation, and also can accurate segmentation of the text image layout is complex.

Multi-viewpoint Image Array Virtual Viewpoint Rapid Generation Algorithm Based on Image Layering

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiang, Lu; Piao, Yan

2018-04-01

The use of multi-view image array combined with virtual viewpoint generation technology to record 3D scene information in large scenes has become one of the key technologies for the development of integrated imaging. This paper presents a virtual viewpoint rendering method based on image layering algorithm. Firstly, the depth information of reference viewpoint image is quickly obtained. During this process, SAD is chosen as the similarity measure function. Then layer the reference image and calculate the parallax based on the depth information. Through the relative distance between the virtual viewpoint and the reference viewpoint, the image layers are weighted and panned. Finally the virtual viewpoint image is rendered layer by layer according to the distance between the image layers and the viewer. This method avoids the disadvantages of the algorithm DIBR, such as high-precision requirements of depth map and complex mapping operations. Experiments show that, this algorithm can achieve the synthesis of virtual viewpoints in any position within 2×2 viewpoints range, and the rendering speed is also very impressive. The average result proved that this method can get satisfactory image quality. The average SSIM value of the results relative to real viewpoint images can reaches 0.9525, the PSNR value can reaches 38.353 and the image histogram similarity can reaches 93.77%.

A Rotor Tip Vortex Tracing Algorithm for Image Post-Processing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Overmeyer, Austin D.

2015-01-01

A neurite tracing algorithm, originally developed for medical image processing, was used to trace the location of the rotor tip vortex in density gradient flow visualization images. The tracing algorithm was applied to several representative test images to form case studies. The accuracy of the tracing algorithm was compared to two current methods including a manual point and click method and a cross-correlation template method. It is shown that the neurite tracing algorithm can reduce the post-processing time to trace the vortex by a factor of 10 to 15 without compromising the accuracy of the tip vortex location compared to other methods presented in literature.

A new pivoting and iterative text detection algorithm for biomedical images.

PubMed

Xu, Songhua; Krauthammer, Michael

2010-12-01

There is interest to expand the reach of literature mining to include the analysis of biomedical images, which often contain a paper's key findings. Examples include recent studies that use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract image text, which is used to boost biomedical image retrieval and classification. Such studies rely on the robust identification of text elements in biomedical images, which is a non-trivial task. In this work, we introduce a new text detection algorithm for biomedical images based on iterative projection histograms. We study the effectiveness of our algorithm by evaluating the performance on a set of manually labeled random biomedical images, and compare the performance against other state-of-the-art text detection algorithms. We demonstrate that our projection histogram-based text detection approach is well suited for text detection in biomedical images, and that the iterative application of the algorithm boosts performance to an F score of .60. We provide a C++ implementation of our algorithm freely available for academic use. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A New Pivoting and Iterative Text Detection Algorithm for Biomedical Images

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Xu, Songhua; Krauthammer, Prof. Michael

2010-01-01

There is interest to expand the reach of literature mining to include the analysis of biomedical images, which often contain a paper's key findings. Examples include recent studies that use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract image text, which is used to boost biomedical image retrieval and classification. Such studies rely on the robust identification of text elements in biomedical images, which is a non-trivial task. In this work, we introduce a new text detection algorithm for biomedical images based on iterative projection histograms. We study the effectiveness of our algorithm by evaluating the performance on a set of manuallymore » labeled random biomedical images, and compare the performance against other state-of-the-art text detection algorithms. We demonstrate that our projection histogram-based text detection approach is well suited for text detection in biomedical images, and that the iterative application of the algorithm boosts performance to an F score of .60. We provide a C++ implementation of our algorithm freely available for academic use.« less

Dimension-Factorized Range Migration Algorithm for Regularly Distributed Array Imaging

PubMed Central

Guo, Qijia; Wang, Jie; Chang, Tianying

2017-01-01

The two-dimensional planar MIMO array is a popular approach for millimeter wave imaging applications. As a promising practical alternative, sparse MIMO arrays have been devised to reduce the number of antenna elements and transmitting/receiving channels with predictable and acceptable loss in image quality. In this paper, a high precision three-dimensional imaging algorithm is proposed for MIMO arrays of the regularly distributed type, especially the sparse varieties. Termed the Dimension-Factorized Range Migration Algorithm, the new imaging approach factorizes the conventional MIMO Range Migration Algorithm into multiple operations across the sparse dimensions. The thinner the sparse dimensions of the array, the more efficient the new algorithm will be. Advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by comparison with the conventional MIMO Range Migration Algorithm and its non-uniform fast Fourier transform based variant in terms of all the important characteristics of the approaches, especially the anti-noise capability. The computation cost is analyzed as well to evaluate the efficiency quantitatively. PMID:29113083

Image-Data Compression Using Edge-Optimizing Algorithm for WFA Inference.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Culik, Karel II; Kari, Jarkko

1994-01-01

Presents an inference algorithm that produces a weighted finite automata (WFA), in particular, the grayness functions of graytone images. Image-data compression results based on the new inference algorithm produces a WFA with a relatively small number of edges. Image-data compression results alone and in combination with wavelets are discussed.…

Comparison of rotation algorithms for digital images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Starovoitov, Valery V.; Samal, Dmitry

1999-09-01

The paper presents a comparative study of several algorithms developed for digital image rotation. No losing generality we studied gray scale images. We have tested methods preserving gray values of the original images, performing some interpolation and two procedures implemented into the Corel Photo-paint and Adobe Photoshop soft packages. By the similar way methods for rotation of color images may be evaluated also.

Visual performance-based image enhancement methodology: an investigation of contrast enhancement algorithms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Neriani, Kelly E.; Herbranson, Travis J.; Reis, George A.; Pinkus, Alan R.; Goodyear, Charles D.

2006-05-01

While vast numbers of image enhancing algorithms have already been developed, the majority of these algorithms have not been assessed in terms of their visual performance-enhancing effects using militarily relevant scenarios. The goal of this research was to apply a visual performance-based assessment methodology to evaluate six algorithms that were specifically designed to enhance the contrast of digital images. The image enhancing algorithms used in this study included three different histogram equalization algorithms, the Autolevels function, the Recursive Rational Filter technique described in Marsi, Ramponi, and Carrato1 and the multiscale Retinex algorithm described in Rahman, Jobson and Woodell2. The methodology used in the assessment has been developed to acquire objective human visual performance data as a means of evaluating the contrast enhancement algorithms. Objective performance metrics, response time and error rate, were used to compare algorithm enhanced images versus two baseline conditions, original non-enhanced images and contrast-degraded images. Observers completed a visual search task using a spatial-forcedchoice paradigm. Observers searched images for a target (a military vehicle) hidden among foliage and then indicated in which quadrant of the screen the target was located. Response time and percent correct were measured for each observer. Results of the study and future directions are discussed.

A hybrid algorithm for speckle noise reduction of ultrasound images.

PubMed

Singh, Karamjeet; Ranade, Sukhjeet Kaur; Singh, Chandan

2017-09-01

Medical images are contaminated by multiplicative speckle noise which significantly reduce the contrast of ultrasound images and creates a negative effect on various image interpretation tasks. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid denoising approach which collaborate the both local and nonlocal information in an efficient manner. The proposed hybrid algorithm consist of three stages in which at first stage the use of local statistics in the form of guided filter is used to reduce the effect of speckle noise initially. Then, an improved speckle reducing bilateral filter (SRBF) is developed to further reduce the speckle noise from the medical images. Finally, to reconstruct the diffused edges we have used the efficient post-processing technique which jointly considered the advantages of both bilateral and nonlocal mean (NLM) filter for the attenuation of speckle noise efficiently. The performance of proposed hybrid algorithm is evaluated on synthetic, simulated and real ultrasound images. The experiments conducted on various test images demonstrate that our proposed hybrid approach outperforms the various traditional speckle reduction approaches included recently proposed NLM and optimized Bayesian-based NLM. The results of various quantitative, qualitative measures and by visual inspection of denoise synthetic and real ultrasound images demonstrate that the proposed hybrid algorithm have strong denoising capability and able to preserve the fine image details such as edge of a lesion better than previously developed methods for speckle noise reduction. The denoising and edge preserving capability of hybrid algorithm is far better than existing traditional and recently proposed speckle reduction (SR) filters. The success of proposed algorithm would help in building the lay foundation for inventing the hybrid algorithms for denoising of ultrasound images. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

High-speed cell recognition algorithm for ultrafast flow cytometer imaging system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhao, Wanyue; Wang, Chao; Chen, Hongwei; Chen, Minghua; Yang, Sigang

2018-04-01

An optical time-stretch flow imaging system enables high-throughput examination of cells/particles with unprecedented high speed and resolution. A significant amount of raw image data is produced. A high-speed cell recognition algorithm is, therefore, highly demanded to analyze large amounts of data efficiently. A high-speed cell recognition algorithm consisting of two-stage cascaded detection and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classification is proposed. The first stage of detection extracts cell regions. The second stage integrates distance transform and the watershed algorithm to separate clustered cells. Finally, the cells detected are classified by GMM. We compared the performance of our algorithm with support vector machine. Results show that our algorithm increases the running speed by over 150% without sacrificing the recognition accuracy. This algorithm provides a promising solution for high-throughput and automated cell imaging and classification in the ultrafast flow cytometer imaging platform.

An AK-LDMeans algorithm based on image clustering

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Huimin; Li, Xingwei; Zhang, Yongbin; Chen, Nan

2018-03-01

Clustering is an effective analytical technique for handling unmarked data for value mining. Its ultimate goal is to mark unclassified data quickly and correctly. We use the roadmap for the current image processing as the experimental background. In this paper, we propose an AK-LDMeans algorithm to automatically lock the K value by designing the Kcost fold line, and then use the long-distance high-density method to select the clustering centers to further replace the traditional initial clustering center selection method, which further improves the efficiency and accuracy of the traditional K-Means Algorithm. And the experimental results are compared with the current clustering algorithm and the results are obtained. The algorithm can provide effective reference value in the fields of image processing, machine vision and data mining.

Expansion of the visual angle of a car rear-view image via an image mosaic algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wu, Zhuangwen; Zhu, Liangrong; Sun, Xincheng

2015-05-01

The rear-view image system is one of the active safety devices in cars and is widely applied in all types of vehicles and traffic safety areas. However, studies made by both domestic and foreign researchers were based on a single image capture device while reversing, so a blind area still remained to drivers. Even if multiple cameras were used to expand the visual angle of the car's rear-view image in some studies, the blind area remained because different source images were not mosaicked together. To acquire an expanded visual angle of a car rear-view image, two charge-coupled device cameras with optical axes angled at 30 deg were mounted below the left and right fenders of a car in three light conditions-sunny outdoors, cloudy outdoors, and an underground garage-to capture rear-view heterologous images of the car. Then these rear-view heterologous images were rapidly registered through the scale invariant feature transform algorithm. Combined with the random sample consensus algorithm, the two heterologous images were finally mosaicked using the linear weighted gradated in-and-out fusion algorithm, and a seamless and visual-angle-expanded rear-view image was acquired. The four-index test results showed that the algorithms can mosaic rear-view images well in the underground garage condition, where the average rate of correct matching was the lowest among the three conditions. The rear-view image mosaic algorithm presented had the best information preservation, the shortest computation time and the most complete preservation of the image detail features compared to the mean value method (MVM) and segmental fusion method (SFM), and it was also able to perform better in real time and provided more comprehensive image details than MVM and SFM. In addition, it had the most complete image preservation from source images among the three algorithms. The method introduced by this paper provided the basis for researching the expansion of the visual angle of a car rear

The wavenumber algorithm for full-matrix imaging using an ultrasonic array.

PubMed

Hunter, Alan J; Drinkwater, Bruce W; Wilcox, Paul D

2008-11-01

Ultrasonic imaging using full-matrix capture, e.g., via the total focusing method (TFM), has been shown to increase angular inspection coverage and improve sensitivity to small defects in nondestructive evaluation. In this paper, we develop a Fourier-domain approach to full-matrix imaging based on the wavenumber algorithm used in synthetic aperture radar and sonar. The extension to the wavenumber algorithm for full-matrix data is described and the performance of the new algorithm compared with the TFM, which we use as a representative benchmark for the time-domain algorithms. The wavenumber algorithm provides a mathematically rigorous solution to the inverse problem for the assumed forward wave propagation model, whereas the TFM employs heuristic delay-and-sum beamforming. Consequently, the wavenumber algorithm has an improved point-spread function and provides better imagery. However, the major advantage of the wavenumber algorithm is its superior computational performance. For large arrays and images, the wavenumber algorithm is several orders of magnitude faster than the TFM. On the other hand, the key advantage of the TFM is its flexibility. The wavenumber algorithm requires a regularly sampled linear array, while the TFM can handle arbitrary imaging geometries. The TFM and the wavenumber algorithm are compared using simulated and experimental data.

Images Encryption Method using Steganographic LSB Method, AES and RSA algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Moumen, Abdelkader; Sissaoui, Hocine

2017-03-01

Vulnerability of communication of digital images is an extremely important issue nowadays, particularly when the images are communicated through insecure channels. To improve communication security, many cryptosystems have been presented in the image encryption literature. This paper proposes a novel image encryption technique based on an algorithm that is faster than current methods. The proposed algorithm eliminates the step in which the secrete key is shared during the encryption process. It is formulated based on the symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption and steganography theories. The image is encrypted using a symmetric algorithm, then, the secret key is encrypted by means of an asymmetrical algorithm and it is hidden in the ciphered image using a least significant bits steganographic scheme. The analysis results show that while enjoying the faster computation, our method performs close to optimal in terms of accuracy.

A high-performance spatial database based approach for pathology imaging algorithm evaluation

PubMed Central

Wang, Fusheng; Kong, Jun; Gao, Jingjing; Cooper, Lee A.D.; Kurc, Tahsin; Zhou, Zhengwen; Adler, David; Vergara-Niedermayr, Cristobal; Katigbak, Bryan; Brat, Daniel J.; Saltz, Joel H.

2013-01-01

Background: Algorithm evaluation provides a means to characterize variability across image analysis algorithms, validate algorithms by comparison with human annotations, combine results from multiple algorithms for performance improvement, and facilitate algorithm sensitivity studies. The sizes of images and image analysis results in pathology image analysis pose significant challenges in algorithm evaluation. We present an efficient parallel spatial database approach to model, normalize, manage, and query large volumes of analytical image result data. This provides an efficient platform for algorithm evaluation. Our experiments with a set of brain tumor images demonstrate the application, scalability, and effectiveness of the platform. Context: The paper describes an approach and platform for evaluation of pathology image analysis algorithms. The platform facilitates algorithm evaluation through a high-performance database built on the Pathology Analytic Imaging Standards (PAIS) data model. Aims: (1) Develop a framework to support algorithm evaluation by modeling and managing analytical results and human annotations from pathology images; (2) Create a robust data normalization tool for converting, validating, and fixing spatial data from algorithm or human annotations; (3) Develop a set of queries to support data sampling and result comparisons; (4) Achieve high performance computation capacity via a parallel data management infrastructure, parallel data loading and spatial indexing optimizations in this infrastructure. Materials and Methods: We have considered two scenarios for algorithm evaluation: (1) algorithm comparison where multiple result sets from different methods are compared and consolidated; and (2) algorithm validation where algorithm results are compared with human annotations. We have developed a spatial normalization toolkit to validate and normalize spatial boundaries produced by image analysis algorithms or human annotations. The validated data

Implementation of digital image encryption algorithm using logistic function and DNA encoding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Suryadi, MT; Satria, Yudi; Fauzi, Muhammad

2018-03-01

Cryptography is a method to secure information that might be in form of digital image. Based on past research, in order to increase security level of chaos based encryption algorithm and DNA based encryption algorithm, encryption algorithm using logistic function and DNA encoding was proposed. Digital image encryption algorithm using logistic function and DNA encoding use DNA encoding to scramble the pixel values into DNA base and scramble it in DNA addition, DNA complement, and XOR operation. The logistic function in this algorithm used as random number generator needed in DNA complement and XOR operation. The result of the test show that the PSNR values of cipher images are 7.98-7.99 bits, the entropy values are close to 8, the histogram of cipher images are uniformly distributed and the correlation coefficient of cipher images are near 0. Thus, the cipher image can be decrypted perfectly and the encryption algorithm has good resistance to entropy attack and statistical attack.

3-D Image Encryption Based on Rubik's Cube and RC6 Algorithm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Helmy, Mai; El-Rabaie, El-Sayed M.; Eldokany, Ibrahim M.; El-Samie, Fathi E. Abd

2017-12-01

A novel encryption algorithm based on the 3-D Rubik's cube is proposed in this paper to achieve 3D encryption of a group of images. This proposed encryption algorithm begins with RC6 as a first step for encrypting multiple images, separately. After that, the obtained encrypted images are further encrypted with the 3-D Rubik's cube. The RC6 encrypted images are used as the faces of the Rubik's cube. From the concepts of image encryption, the RC6 algorithm adds a degree of diffusion, while the Rubik's cube algorithm adds a degree of permutation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed encryption algorithm is efficient, and it exhibits strong robustness and security. The encrypted images are further transmitted over wireless Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system and decrypted at the receiver side. Evaluation of the quality of the decrypted images at the receiver side reveals good results.

Validation of an improved 'diffeomorphic demons' algorithm for deformable image registration in image-guided radiation therapy.

PubMed

Zhou, Lu; Zhou, Linghong; Zhang, Shuxu; Zhen, Xin; Yu, Hui; Zhang, Guoqian; Wang, Ruihao

2014-01-01

Deformable image registration (DIR) was widely used in radiation therapy, such as in automatic contour generation, dose accumulation, tumor growth or regression analysis. To achieve higher registration accuracy and faster convergence, an improved 'diffeomorphic demons' registration algorithm was proposed and validated. Based on Brox et al.'s gradient constancy assumption and Malis's efficient second-order minimization (ESM) algorithm, a grey value gradient similarity term and a transformation error term were added into the demons energy function, and a formula was derived to calculate the update of transformation field. The limited Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (L-BFGS) algorithm was used to optimize the energy function so that the iteration number could be determined automatically. The proposed algorithm was validated using mathematically deformed images and physically deformed phantom images. Compared with the original 'diffeomorphic demons' algorithm, the registration method proposed achieve a higher precision and a faster convergence speed. Due to the influence of different scanning conditions in fractionated radiation, the density range of the treatment image and the planning image may be different. In such a case, the improved demons algorithm can achieve faster and more accurate radiotherapy.

Image segmentation algorithm based on improved PCNN

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Hong; Wu, Chengdong; Yu, Xiaosheng; Wu, Jiahui

2017-11-01

A modified simplified Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) model is proposed in this article based on simplified PCNN. Some work have done to enrich this model, such as imposing restrictions items of the inputs, improving linking inputs and internal activity of PCNN. A self-adaptive parameter setting method of linking coefficient and threshold value decay time constant is proposed here, too. At last, we realized image segmentation algorithm for five pictures based on this proposed simplified PCNN model and PSO. Experimental results demonstrate that this image segmentation algorithm is much better than method of SPCNN and OTSU.