International Journal of Advanced Computer Science, Vol. 2, No. 1, Pp. 24-27, Jan. 2012.

Spatial Domain Robust Watermarking Scheme for Color Image

Manik Mondal & Debalina Barik
Abstract Designing an efficient watermarking technique for digital media is still a challenge. Here we presented a robust watermarking method in spatial domain of the color image. We divided the image into eight parts and embedded the binary form of the copyright information after encrypting each bit with a secret key, inside the blue component of the color image. We used a random sequence for selecting the pixel in which we want to insert the information. We stored the information in the blue component of the pixel. We put the recovery record by changing the corresponding green component of the pixel, comparing the changed blue component and the red component of the pixel.. The extraction of the copyright information is based on comparing red and green component with the blue component of the pixel from any available block or part of the any eight block of the image. Testing is done by Stirmark benchmark 4.0. The test result shows that the proposed method is very secure and robust against various attacks.

Manuscript
Received: 30,Jun., 2011 Revised: 10,Aug., 2011 Accepted: 10,Dec., 2011 Published: 15,Feb., 2012

Keywords
Digital copyright, Image processing, Security, Watermarking

1. Introduction
Digital Watermarking is a technique for inserting signature or information (watermark) into an image, which can be later extracted or detected for authenticity purpose. The unique signature or the mark may be visible, semi-visible or completely invisible to the human eyes. In the research we are interested about the completely invisible watermark for Image only. Invisible watermark should have the two most important properties that the embedding of the extra information should not alter the quality of the image and the mark should be robust enough with respect to image distortion. This means the watermark is difficult for an attacker to remove and it should be also robust to common image processing and geometric operations, such as filtering, resizing, cropping and image compression [4].

watermarking system demands. Security of watermarking means that the watermark should be difficult to remove or alter without damaging the original image. As all watermarking systems seek to protect watermark information, without loss of generality, watermarking security can be regarded as the ability to assure secrecy and integrity of the watermark information, and resist malicious attacks [3]. The imperceptibility refers to the perceptual transparency of the watermark. Ideally, no perceptible difference between the watermarked and original signal should exist [4, 5]. A straightforward way to reduce distortion during watermarking process is embedding the watermark into the perceptually insignificant portion of the host signal [5]. Capacity of watermarking normally refers to the amount of information we want to embed inside the image. If the capacity is higher, then the transparency reduces accordingly. Also the robustness of the watermark weakens if we embed higher amount of data compare to the size of the image. Robustness of watermarking means the capability of the watermark to remain intact against various kinds of attacks and alteration of image such as adding noise or cropping or any kind of transformation of the image. After any kind of alteration if we can detect the existence of the previously embedded watermark, then we can say that the watermark is robust. We cannot say that a watermark is guaranteed to survive against all kind of attacks but as the degree of attack increases, the distortion of the image takes place. Also the exact level of robustness an algorithm must possess cannot be specified without considering the application scenario [5].

3. Domain Specific Watermarking

Several different methods are available for watermarking. Generally type of watermarking can be embedded inside the image in Special domain or Transform domain. Spatial domain watermarking is very similar to steganography where we use Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution by replacing the last bit of the color intensity value if the image is color image or by replacing the last bit of the Color Lookup Table (CLUT) values. If the image is gray scale image, then we just change the last bit of the

2. Major Requirements of Watermarking Technique

There are four major requirements that any

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pixel. This type of watermarking is fragile and easily detectable. A watermark is said to be fragile if the watermark hidden within the image is destroyed as soon as the watermarked undergoes any manipulation. Watermarking can be applied after transforming the image into frequency domain. We can use Fourier transform, wavelet transform or discrete cosine transform. Then, transform domain coefficients are modified by the watermark. The inverse transform is finally applied in order to obtain the watermarked image.

If we simply store the copyright information this way then the whole process becomes much simpler but also becomes extremely vulnerable against different kind of attacks. To protect against these kinds of attacks we selected only the blue component for writing 1 bit information and we used green component to make an odd parity with the red component as a recovery record for the 1 bit information. The following table shows the change of pixels.
TABLE 1: CHANGED COLOR COMPONENT VALUES
Pixel No 1 2 3 Red 10001110 11110001 10010010 Green 10011000 00101100 11000100 Blue 10101111 10011100 00100111

For example the 1st pixel had the blue component value 10101110 and green component value 10011001. We changed the last bit by 1 with our data. Now to make an odd parity with the red component, we toggled the last bit of the green component. Here have used an encryption method on the copyright information first. Then we embedded the data inside the image. We used a Stego Key from the user as a password for storing and retrieving the information. To protect against steg-analysis which indicates that some other information is stored inside the image, we used a randomizing function for selecting which pixel to write first and so on. First we divided the whole image into eight parts. Then we embed the watermark as shown in the figure 2. The encrypted information is repeatedly placed into the corresponding non-overlapping blocks. The proposed algorithm can be described below: Step 1: Copyright Information is encrypted with a secret key Step 2: Original image is divided into 8 parts as described in the figure 2. Step 3: Divide the information according to the block size which is either th or th. Step 4: A non-overlapping randomization function is generated from the secret key which selects the pixels for writing one by one. Step 5: The data bits of the information is embedded in the LSB of blue component. If data bit D = 1 then, Set LSB(BLUE) = Else Set LSB(BLUE) = 0 Step 6: If D = 1 AND LSB(RED) = 1 then 1

Fig. 1. Watermarking technique in transform domain.

Transform domain watermarking is robust compare to the spatial domain watermarking but when a fragile watermark is present in an image, we can infer, with a high probability, that the image has not been altered [1].

4. Proposed Watermarking Method

We used spatial domain watermarking method to maintain the integrity property of the image. In addition we used encryption on the copyright information so that the extraction of the watermark is possible only with the right key. In this scheme we used 24-bit uncompressed color image namely bitmap (BMP) format. In a 24-bit color image each pixel is represented by 3 bytes, each byte is 8-bits long. Each of these 3 bytes in the pixel represents the value of either the red, green or blue (RGB) color component. As an example, the bit-data of one black pixel would be: red byte green byte blue byte 00000000 00000000 00000000 A green pixel would be: red byte green byte blue byte 00000000 11111111 00000000 We can store 3bit data by simply changing the least significant bit of each of these three components. This change of intensity value of the pixel will be undetectable by human eyes.
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International Journal of Advanced Computer Science, Vol. 2, No. 1, Pp. 24-27, Jan. 2012.

LSB(GREEN) = 1 Else LSB(GREEN) = 0 Step 7: Repeat Step 3 to Step 6 until all the data bits are embedded inside the block. The block diagram of the proposed algorithm is shown in Figure 3 After embedding watermark, robustness property of the watermark was done by cropping, rotation, noise attack and compression. Some of the results of cropping are shows in Figure 5.

Fig. 2. A, B, C and D are the four copies of the copyright information. B is the reverse of A and D is the reverse of C.

Fig. 5. Attacks on Watermarked Image. Fig. 3. The block diagram of the proposed algorithm.

The extraction of the watermark can be done from any of the available block.

TABLE 2: STIRMARK TEST RESULTS

Attacks Percentage Watermark 100 100 100 98.7 28 100 89.31 100 100 90.13 52.45 47.91 99.33 92.11 53.77 45.75 of Recovered

5. Test Results
Testing was done under the Stirmark benchmark 4.0 which is a standard testing platform for various kinds of image transformation and distortion test. In this test we used the image of lena, 24 bit uncompressed bitmap file of size 512x512 pixels and a text file containing copyright information of size 100 byte and 1024 byte.

JPEG 100% JPEG 80% JPEG 50% JPEG 30% JPEG 10% Gaussian Noise 50% Gaussian Noise 70% Scaling 0.5 Scaling 2 Rotation 90 Rotation with Cropping(300) Rotation with Cropping(450) Median Filter 5x5 Median Filter 7x7 Rotation & Cropping Rotation with Noise and Cropping

(a)

(b)

Fig. 4. Watermarked Image with(a) 100 byte, (b) 1024 byte Copyright Information

Results of Rotation test and noise attack was shown in the figure 5(e) & 5(f). We used Stirmark to perform other transformation, JPEG compression and distortion. Table 2
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shows some of the results of the effectiveness of our proposed method. From these results we can conclude that our method is robust enough to successfully retrieve the copyright information.

6. Suggestion
In this report, we discussed about a new kind of spatial domain watermarking techniques, especially the fragile type authentication watermarking techniques. This scheme is closely related to steganography, where one can transmit data through a cover medium such as image. In our method we can use transform domain watermarking to guard against forgery but our main goal is to prove creators authentication and a 'trust' between two parties by inserting creators copyright information. The whole information is embedded in an encrypted way that one with the right key/password can extract from the watermarked image. The test result shows that our scheme is very secure against various attacks.

Manik Mondal was born in Kolkata, India, in 1981. He received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from West Bengal University of Technology in 2005 and University of Kalyani in 2007, respectively. He is the author or coauthor of more than six national and international papers. He is the Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department at Government College of Engineering & Textile Technology, Serampore, India. Debalina Barik was born in Haldia, India, in 1983. She received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from West Bengal University of Technology in 2006 and Jadavpur University in 2010, respectively. She is the author or coauthor of more than six national and international papers. She also worked at Cognizant Technology Solutions. She works at Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department.

References
[1] Y. Yuan and C.T. Li. Fragile Watermarking Scheme Exploiting Non-deterministic Block-wise Dependency. In Proc. of the IAPR Int. Conf. on Pattern Recognition, vol. IV, pp. 849-852, Cambridge, UK, 2004. L. M. Cheng, L. L. Cheng, C. K. Chan, and K. W. Ng, "Digital watermarking based on frequency random position insertion," presented at Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision Conference, vol. 2, 2004. C.-T. Li and F.M. Yang. One-dimensional Neighborhood Forming Strategy for Fragile Watermarking. In Journal of Electronic Imaging, vol. 12, 2003. F. A. P. Petitcolas, R. J. Anderson, and M. G. Kuhn, "Information hiding-a survey," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 87, pp. 1062- 1078, 1999. I. J. Cox, M.L. Miller and J.A. Bloom. Digital Watermarking. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, USA, 2002. Fabien A. P. Petitcolas, Ross J. Anderson, Markus G. Kuhn. Attacks on copyright marking systems, in David Aucsmith (Ed), Information Hiding, Second International Workshop, IH98, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., April 15 -17, 1998, Proceedings, LNCS 1525, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-65386-4, pp. 219-239. Fabien A. P. Petitcolas. Watermarking schemes evaluation. I.E.E.E. Signal Processing, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 5864, September 2000.

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