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Ergodic Chaotic Parameter Modulation With

Application to Digital Image Watermarking
Siyue Chen, Student Member, IEEE, and Henry Leung, Member, IEEE

AbstractThis paper presents a novel technique for image

watermarking based on chaos theory. Chaotic parameter modulation (CPM) is employed to modulate the copyright information
into the bifurcating parameter of a chaotic system. The system
output is a wideband signal and is used as a watermark to be
inserted into the host image. In the detection, a novel method
based on the ergodic property of chaotic signal is developed to
demodulate the embedded copyright information. Compared to
previous works on blind watermarking, the proposed technique
can effectively remove the interference from the host image and,
thus, improve the detection performance dramatically. Simulation results show that the ergodic CPM approach is effective for
image watermarking in terms of noise performance, robustness
against attacks, and payload. In addition, its implementation
is very simple and the computation speed is fast. Compared
to holographic transform domain method and the conventional
spread spectrum watermarking scheme, the proposed technique
is shown to be superior.
Index TermsBifurcating parameter, chaotic parameter modulation (CPM), digital watermarking, spread spectrum (SS).

I. INTRODUCTION

FFICIENT distribution, reproduction, and manipulation

have led to wide proliferation of digital media. However,
they also increase the problems associated with copyright
enforcement. For this reason, digital watermarking has been
widely used to reduce counterfeiting by embedding a secret
signal in a way not discernible but hard to remove. Since the
embedded signal contains the copyright information and always
stays with the host data, it can be used as a proof of ownership
or furthermore to trace illegal redistribution on the Internet.
Many image watermarking schemes use the spread spectrum
(SS) technique, which is widely used to embed the watermark
[1][3]. The bits composing the information signal (e.g., the serial number denoting the copyright) are modulated by a SS sequence and are added to the host image. At the receiver end, a
correlator can be used to retrieve the watermark signal. The sign
of the correlation is usually used to determine if the binary bit 1
or 1 is transmitted. When the interference or attacks are uncorrelated with the SS sequence, the watermark signal can tolerate
a relatively high level of distortion.
In SS schemes, the host image itself is seen as a source of interference [4], [5]. The embedded watermark is in general much
weaker than the host image to guarantee its imperceptibility.
Manuscript received February 5, 2002; revised August 1, 2004. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Gopal Pingali.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4 Canada (e-mail: chens@ucalgary.ca; leungh@ucalgary.ca).
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TIP.2005.854475

Therefore, the detection of the watermark is usually performed

under the strong background noise. In conventional SS methods,
a long SS sequence is required to achieve a satisfactory performance. However, because of the limited size of the digital image
the increase of the SS sequence length will result in a low payload of the watermark. For instance, say the size of an image is
and the spreading sequence length is , the maximum
number of information bits that can be inserted into the watermark is
, where
is the round off operator to
the nearest integer. Apparently, there is a tradeoff between the
length of the PN sequence and the payload.
In [5], Cox et al. present a framework of communication with
side information, in which they indicate the need for removing
the inuence of the host signal in the watermark detection. More
recently, different approaches based on that framework have
been proposed [6]. These approaches correspond to the cases of
maximizing correlation coefcient, maximizing robustness,
and requiring constant robustness. However, they still cannot
remove the interference completely from the host image. In addition, these approaches are based on using the correlation coefcients for detection. When correlation is used as the detection
criteria, these approaches are found to degenerate into the conventional SS method.
In [7], Bruckstein and Richardson propose a holographic
transform domain image watermarking method. Their method
embeds the watermark by modifying the discrete Fourier
transform (DFT) coefcients in transform domain. A maximum likelihood estimator is employed to decode the inserted
watermark signal. The method is relatively robust to various
image processing, including JPEG compression, cropping and
scanning, printing. However, it requires the use of the original
watermarked image, which is not available in blind detection,
to compare with the distorted watermarked image. Therefore,
the problem of reducing interference from the host image for
blind watermarking is still unsolved.
In this paper, we propose an effective scheme called the ergodic chaotic parameter modulation (ECPM) method. This approach modulates the information signal into the bifurcating
parameter of a chaotic system. The chaotic system output is
then generated as watermark signal, and is inserted into the
host image. In the detection process, the ergodicity of a chaotic
signal based on the Birkhoff ergodic theorem [8] for dynamical
systems is exploited to demodulate the watermark signal from
noisy background. It is shown here the robustness of the proposed technique is dramatically improved since the interference
from the host image can be removed efciently. When the payload is high and the corresponding SS sequence length has to be
short, the improvement of the ECPM watermarking scheme is
found to be more signicant.

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The paper is organized as follows. Section II briey describes

the CPM watermarking scheme. Section III presents the novel
ergodic approach for demodulating a CPM signal and its application to image watermarking. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed theoretically in Section IV. Section V
reports the robustness evaluation and the comparison with other
approaches. Conclusion remarks are given in Section VI.
II. DIGITAL WATERMARKING USING
CHAOTIC SPREAD SPECTRUM
To achieve a low probability of being detected, a watermark
signal is preferred to be wideband and noise like. In SS watermarking, an SS sequence is usually used to spread out the
information signal to provide wideband, at spectrum, and
pseudorandom signals for watermarks. Here, we propose using
a chaotic system to generate such noise-like signals. A chaotic
system is a deterministic dynamical system that generates
random trajectories with wideband and noise-like behavior [9].
Mathematically, it can be represented by a nonlinear system
given by
(1)
where is the bifurcating parameter, and is the embedding
dimension of the dynamical system.
The CPM scheme has been proposed for both analog and
digital SS systems [10], [11]. The main advantages of CPM
are its robustness to synchronization errors and potential higher
capacity. It is also one of the few practical SS approaches
for analog implementations. When CPM is applied to watermarking, the copyright information is stored in the bifurcating
be a separameters. Let
quence of information bits to be inserted into a host image, the
modulation process can be modeled by
(2)
is usually a linear transformation to make sure that all lie in
the chaotic regime. For the purpose of generating random wideband signals as watermarks, a one-dimensional (1-D) chaotic
map, i.e.,
, is usually found to be sufcient. The
watermark is, thus, generated by
,
, and is added to the original image pixel to provide a watermarked image. That is
(3)
denotes the watermarked pixel to hide
,
dewhere
notes the original pixel value, and is a scalar used to amplify
or attenuate the power of the watermark. Therefore, detection
becomes estimating the bifurcating parameter from the watermarked image.
When a small amount of geometric distortion is applied to
the watermarked image, it is shown that it can prevent an accurate watermark detection [12], [13]. This problem is most pronounced for blind watermarking. Various solutions have been
proposed in the literatures, and they can be roughly divided into
two categories: those based on using some invariance [3], [14],
and those by embedding a template into the image so that some
information about the geometric transformation applied to the

Fig. 1. Illustration of the template generation and insertion.

image can be obtained [15], [16]. Because of the difculty in inverting the invariant representation to provide the watermarked
image, we take the template approach given in [16], and insert
a template composed of 14 points into the DFT domain of the
image besides a watermark. Those points are distributed uniformly along two lines (seven points per line), which go through
the origin (usually the center of the DFT domain of the image)
at angles and as illustrated in Fig. 1. The angles and radii
(the distance from the point to the origin) of each point are
chosen pseudorandomly. It is known that an image, which has
undergone a linear transformation, will have undergone the inverse linear transformation in the DFT domain. Thus, the two
lines going through the origin will still cross the origin, and go
through the same transformation. Exploiting this knowledge, a
matched template can be found in the distorted image by an exhaustive search. The parameter of such a transform can then be
identied, and the inverse process can be applied to compensate
for the distortion prior to watermark detection.
III. WATERMARK DETECTION USING ECPM
A. Estimating Chaotic Parameters Based on Ergodic Theory
Considering a 1-D chaotic map
,
is the
sequence of chaotic signal generated by this map and is within
the chaotic regime
. According to the Birkhoff erexists
godic theorem [8], the limit
and is equal to the constant
. This limit is independent
of the initial condition
and is only determined by the bifurcating parameter . In other words, each bifurcating parameter
has a unique invariant ergodic measure for
the chaotic map . We use the term mean value function to
represent this relationship, i.e.,
. Fig. 2 is plotted for
the mean value function of the Chebyshev map dened by
(4)

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Fig. 2.

Mean value curve of the chaotic signals generated by the Chebyshev map using different bifurcating parameters.

An interesting observation is that is a monotone function of

. It is this unique monotone property that we base on to develop the efcient ergodic chaos demodulator. In fact, besides
the Chebyshev map, other maps such as the Tent map are also
discovered to possess this monotone property [17].
Using the additive measurement noise model, a noisy chaotic
sequence
is given by
(5)
With the use of the ECPM scheme, the ensemble average from
the received signal
can be computed as
(6)
Let
tion (6) becomes

and

. Equa(7)

If
is the corresponding parameter that generates
, we
have
as
. Using the standard assumption
that
in (5) is a zero-mean white Gaussian process, i.e.,
as
, we have
, and
furthermore
. Therefore, if the mean value
function
is known, we can obtain an accurate estimate of
by inverting
. That is,
. The monotone property of
guarantees the existence of
.
Since an analytical expression of
for a chaotic map is
usually difcult to derive, we can estimate by minimizing the
objective function as
(8)

in (8) is computed numerically by

, where
is the chaotic signal
generated by (5) with the bifurcating parameter equal to ,
and
is assumed to be large. Since
is continuous and
monotone,
is a continuous, nonnegative, unimodal function of , and has a minimum value of zero at
. Fig. 3
depicts the objective function
for the Chebyshev map with
. Apparently,
has a unique global minimum
at
. Exploiting this knowledge, the estimate
of can be obtained by searching through the chaotic regime
to minimize
. The Golden section search
method [18] is employed here.
It is noted that the feasibility of the SS scheme is based on
two general assumptions. One is that both SS sequences and
noise attacks are zero mean processes. The other is that they
are uncorrelated to each other. However, the proposed ECPM
scheme only requires the zero mean noise assumption to achieve
a good performance. It also indicates that the ECPM method is
more robust in resisting various noise attacks.
In this study, a message signal composed of randomly generated numerical values is used for transmission through an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. For fair comparisons, the power of the transmitted signal and the sequence
lengths for spreading one information bit are set the same for
both the ECPM and SS schemes. The noise power is varied to
generate different SNR values. The performance is measured by
mean-square error (MSE) given as

with respect to

(9)
A small MSE value indicates a better detection performance.
The simulation results are plotted in Fig. 4. It is seen that as

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Fig. 3. Unimodal objective function J () for the Chebyshev map with  = 1:65.

Fig. 4. Error performance comparison between the ECPM approach and the SS scheme versus SNR values.

the SNR value decreases, the performance of the SS scheme degrades signicantly. Only at high SNR, the SS scheme achieves
a performance close to that of the ECPM approach. In addition,
the MSE curve of the ECPM approach is relatively smooth and
at, indicating that the proposed scheme is not sensitive to the
noise power, as long as the noise mean is close to zero. There-

fore, the ECPM approach can work effectively in the strong

noisy background.
B. Watermark Detection Using ECPM
When ECPM is applied to watermarking, the watermarked
pixel is rst extracted with the prior knowledge of the watermark

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Fig. 5. Real mean values of the image pixels  and the estimated values  using Wiener lter.
^

location. The ensemble average of the extracted watermarked

pixels is then calculated as
, where
is the received watermarked image pixel value. Since the watermarked image is usually corrupted by some distortions, we can
further interpret
as
, where
denotes
the distortion. Thus, we have

,
and
are the variances
where
of
and
, respectively. Although
cannot be obtained
directly, an estimate of the watermarked image can be obtained
as
. It is expected that
is
close to , unless the watermarked image has been damaged
to a level that it cannot be further used for commercial purpose.
Therefore, (12) can be expressed as

(10)

(13)

where ,
and
denote the ensemble averages of the original image pixel, the watermark, and the distortion, respectively.
From (10), the mean of the original image
has to be determined for the estimation of the watermark mean. In other words,
the interference from the host data has to be removed. Since the
original image is not available in blind detection, we employ
Wiener lter to estimate
here. Wiener ltering is commonly
used in image restoration and denoising [19]. It exhibits optimal
performance when both image and noise statistics are Gaussian.
Suppose that the mean of the whole image can be written as

The variance

can be calculated as
. And
can be determined by a priori.
That is, it can be obtained by applying a large amount of tests
on images. The simulation results as plotted in Fig. 5 show that
Wiener lter can estimate the mean value of the original image
pixels accurately. The MSE between the real and the estimated
values is as small as
.
With an estimated value of , the interference from the host
image can be removed effectively. The estimated mean value of
the chaotic watermark can then be obtained according to (10) as

(11)
(14)
can be assumed as a Gaussian random variable with the mean
. Since a watermark has to be imperceptible, it is a much
weaker signal compared to image pixels. Therefore,
can be treated as a small Gaussian noise added to , and can
be estimated accurately from the distorted watermarked image
by
(12)

Compared with (7), (14) is very similar except for having

instead of . Therefore, the ECPM approach can be
applied to estimate and to demodulate the information bit
afterwards. Since the distortion introduced by most common
image processing can be assumed as the zero mean noise
attack, the proposed scheme is expected to work effectively in
watermarking applications.

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IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF WATERMARKING

BINARY INFORMATION
In this section, we discuss the performance of the proposed
method in watermarking binary information. Considering that
the binary information signal is composed of two symbols, 0 and
1, only two parameters are needed to generate the corresponding
chaotic waveforms. That is
if
if

(15)

The detection process, therefore, does not require estimating a

wide range of parameters but determining only two values,
and . An obvious necessary condition is that and should
not have the same mean value, that is,
. Without
.
loss of generality, we choose and so that
, we have to determine the
To retrieve the information bit
given in (14). When
value of the bifurcating parameter from
takes on only two values, the demodulation can be simplied
to a binary decision process. That is
Fig. 6. Original image of Lena used as the host data.

if
if

(16)

where
is a threshold for decision making. In this study, we
and
. That
choose to be the midpoint between
. Comparing the estimated mean
is,
value of the watermark to , we have

Recall that
and assume that the distoris a random variable, which has a normal distribution
tion
can be
with zero mean and variance . The variance of
written as

(17)
When the transmitted symbol is 0, we have
in (15). And (17) becomes

as given
(23)
(18)

Similarly, (17) can be written as

Using (23), the probability of error detection in (22) can be further written as

(19)
for the transmitted symbol 1. If we dene
(20)
(24)
as the mean distance of the two corresponding bifurcating parameters, (18) and (19) can be further written as

for

(21)

From (16) and (21), a bit error occurs when

or
. Combining these
two possibilities, we have the probability of error detection as
(22)

Equation (24) indicates that using a large value of the sequence length , the scalar , or the mean distance
can
produce less detection errors. Figs. 79 plot the theoretical BER
curves derived above with the corresponding Monte Carlo simulations. In the simulations, the image Lena as shown in Fig. 6
is used as the host image. A binary sequence is randomly generated as the information signal to be transmitted. Each information bit is modulated into the bifurcating parameter as described
above to generate the watermark. Noise is added to the watermarked image. Using the ECPM method, the information bit is
retrieved and compared to the original one. The number of error

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Fig. 7.

Theoretical and empirical BER curves versus different mean distances for the Chebyshev map with N = 1024,  = 5 and  = 2.

bits is counted and divided by the total amount of binary information, providing the bit-error rate (BER).
In Fig. 7, the scalar , the sequence length , and the variance of additive noise are set as 2, 1024, and 5, respectively.
The curves are plotted versus different values of mean distances.
Although the mean distance ranges from 0 to 0.8528 for the
Chebyshev map, we vary the mean distance between 0.0716 and
0.8528 in our experiments. From the gure, it is found that there
is a drastic improvement in BER when the mean distance is over
0.25. Therefore, to achieve a satisfactory detection, we take two
bifurcating parameters with the mean distance of at least 0.25.
The empirical curve is found to uctuate around the theoretical
one and the difference is quite small.
Fig. 8 depicts the BER values versus sequence length.
varies between 60 and 1000 with a step size of 10. The theoretical BER value is close to zero when becomes larger than
300. Again, the empirical curve is very close to the theoretical
BER. In Fig. 9, the relationship between the BER and noise variance is illustrated. The BER value is reduced when the noise
variance gets smaller. All three analyzes show that the experimental results are consistent with the analytical probability of
error derived in (24).
It should also be noted from (24) that the interference from
the host image has no direct impact on the error performance,
which is quite different from the conventional SS watermarking
scheme. According to the theoretical analysis given in [20], the
error performance of the SS watermarking scheme can be expressed as
(25)

is the variance of the SS sequence, and

is the variwhere
ance of the image pixels. The SS scheme achieves the optimal
error performance when
. However,
indicates
, and, thus, is not applicable in real practice when
distortions are introduced. Furthermore, even when is set as
1, the interference from the host data, , on the error performance, still cannot be removed completely as given by
(26)
Comparing (26) to (24), we nd that if
, the detection performance of the proposed ECPM
method is better than the optimal performance of the SS scheme
with
.
There are two situations for
.
The rst one is
. Considering that
the power of the chaotic watermark can be written as
, and the power of the SS watermark is , this situation is basically equivalent to increasing
the watermark power. The second situation for obtaining an
improved performance is
. Since
is usually a small value, compared to the image
pixel variance, , the second situation can indeed occur in
practice. Furthermore, when
is a constant,
becomes much larger than
as
is
decreased. Recalling that the maximum number of the information bits that can be inserted into the host image is equal
to
, a large
will result in a small payload of
watermark. Therefore, the ECPM approach can have a higher
payload than the conventional SS scheme in this situation,
while keeping the detection error at the same level.

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Fig. 8.

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Theoretical and empirical BER curves versus different sequence lengths for the Chebyshev map with

1M = 0:5089, 

Fig. 9. Theoretical and empirical BER curves versus different value of noise variances for the Chebyshev map with

V. ROBUSTNESS TESTS AGAINEST ATTACKS

A practical watermarking scheme has to be robust to attacks
and image processing. In the following, widely used image processing procedures, including image rotation, cropping, median
ltering, and compression are employed here as attacks to evaluate the robustness of the proposed watermarking system. The
holographic method proposed in [7] and the improved SS (ISS)
scheme [20] are also considered for comparison.

= 5, and

 = 2.

1M = 0:5089, N = 1024, and  = 2.

Our experiments are divided into two parts. The rst type
of experiments investigates the robustness performance of the
three watermarking schemes under different kinds of attacks.
The sequence length is set as 512 for all three schemes. For
fair comparison, the power of the inserted watermark signal is
controlled at the same level so that the delity degradations introduced by the three watermark insertions are the same. For the
ECPM approach, the Chebyshev map in (4) is used to generate
the chaotic watermark. The bifurcating parameters are selected

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BER performance comparison of the holographic method, the ISS scheme, and the ECPM approach under the rotating attack for different rotation angles.

as
and
, providing a mean distance of
0.6662. For the ISS scheme, a -sequence is employed as the
spreading sequence.
The second type of experiments evaluates the impact of the
on the robustness performance of the ISS
sequence length
as
scheme and the ECPM approach when
analyzed above. The sequence length is set as 127, 255, 512,
is equal to 28.4046 for
and 1023, respectively. And
is equal to 63.441 for the ISS
the ECPM approach, while
scheme. As for the holographic method, although it is different
from the ISS scheme by the way of watermark embedding, it
also employs a normalized correlator to do the detection. Thus,
the sequence length has the same impact on this method as on
the ISS scheme. So we do not take it for the performance comparison in this test.
A. Image Rotation
With the use of template matching, the rotation attack can
be compensated for by identifying the rotation angle and then
rotating the image back. Hence, the introduced distortion only
comes from the interpolation due to image rotation. The BER
curves for the three different schemes are plotted in Fig. 10. The
rotating angle is the degree that the original watermarked image
has been rotated, and is set as 45, 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and
5, respectively. It can be seen that the ECPM approach has a
better performance than the ISS scheme when the rotation angle
is large, for 30 and above. Both schemes are found to be more
robust than the holographic method.
Fig. 11 is plotted the results for the second experiment. It is
found that even when the sequence length is as short as 127, the
ECPM approach still can achieve a very good performance. As
for the ISS scheme, when is decreased to 255, the detection

error starts occur. When the sequence length becomes shorter,

the ISS performance strongly degrades.
B. Image Cropping
Image cropping cuts off some certain portion of the original
image. Therefore, the watermark in the cropped area will be lost.
The BER results of different watermarking schemes are shown
in Fig. 12. The eight cropping parameters are set as 0.05, 0.1,
0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9, respectively, which means that
0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9 times of the original
watermarked image is retained after cropping. From the gure,
we can see that the ECPM approach has a superior performance
to the holographic method. The detection error of the ECPM
approach does not occur until the cropping parameter decreases
to 0.1. However, the ISS scheme is more robust than the ECPM
approach to the cropping attack. It is because this attack changes
the whole cropped portion to zero and does not affect the rest of
the image at all. For the ECPM approach, this results in a change
of the mean of the extracted watermark. However, for the correlation method, the remaining spread signal still has a strong correlation with the SS sequence and, hence, gives a good detection
performance. But when the sequence length is decreased, the
ISS performance will degrade drastically that its performance
becomes worse than that of ECPM as shown in Fig. 13.
C. Median Filtering
A median lter is often used in an image or multimedia
system to reduce noise without blurring edges and losing other
sharp details. But when it is applied to the original image, it can
be considered as introducing nonlinear distortions to the image
pixels. The BER under this attack are shown in Fig. 14. The
ltering parameter is the window size of the median lter. They
are set as 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2, respectively. The ECPM scheme

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Fig. 11.

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BER performance comparison for different sequence lengths between ISS and ECPM under the rotation attack by 30 .

Fig. 12. BER performance comparison of the holographic method, the ISS scheme, and the ECPM approach under the cropping attack for different cropping
parameter.

consistently outperforms the holographic method and the ISS

scheme. Overall, all three watermarking schemes are found to
have larger BER values under this nonlinear attack compared
to the previous attacks. The median ltering replaces all pixel
values by the median in a neighborhood of that pixel and, thus,
causes nonlinear distortion on the image. From our observations, the median ltering introduces a stronger distortion than
other geometric attacks, especially when a template matching
is employed. The BER performance under this attack versus
different sequence lengths is plotted in Fig. 15. Again, the
ECPM approach is found to have a more robust performance.

D. Image Compression
Image compression addresses the problem of reducing the
amount of the data for transmission and storage. It is now an
essential component in all image and multimedia systems. In
Fig. 16, the BER curves are plotted for the three watermarking
schemes under JPEG compression. The quality factor 10, 20, 30,
40, 50, 60, and 70 is used as the compression factor, respectively.
The ECPM approach outperforms the holographic method, but
is slightly better than the ISS scheme when the quality factor is
as small as 10, 20, or 30. Fig. 17 plots the performances under

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 14, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2005

BER performance comparison for different sequence lengths between ISS and ECPM under the cropping attack with the cropping parameter equal to 0.4.

Fig. 14. BER performance comparison of the holographic method, the ISS scheme, and the ECPM approach under the median ltering attack for different ltering
parameters.

various sequence length. When the sequence length is short, the

ECPM approach is again found to be more effectively.
To summarize the experimental results, it is shown that the
proposed method is robust to geometric distortions as well as
image cropping and JPEG compression. However, it is relatively
less resistant to nonlinear distortions such as median lter that
might cause changes in the mean value. Compared to the con-

ventional watermarking methods, the ECPM approach is found

to have superior robustness performance, especially when the
sequence length is short.
It should also be noted that the ECPM has a much simpler
implementation than the other two techniques. Most of the calculations involved in the ECPM method are addition, which is
the most basic and the fastest operation in modern computing

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Fig. 16.
factors.

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BER performance comparison of the holographic method, the ISS scheme, and the ECPM approach under the JPEG compression for different quality

Fig. 15. BER performance comparison for different sequence lengths between ISS and ECPM under the median ltering with the ltering parameter equal to 3.

machines. For the holographic method and the ISS scheme, because correlation requires many multiplication operations, the
speed is relatively slow.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking scheme called
ECPM for digital images. The information signal is modulated
into the bifurcating parameter of a chaotic dynamical system.

Retrieval of the copyright information is then formulated as a

problem of parameter estimation from a noisy chaotic signal.
Based on the one-to-one relationship between the bifurcating
parameter and the mean value, an ergodic demodulator is developed here to detect the chaotic watermark. The theoretical
error performance of the ECPM watermarking method is derived and is validated using computer simulation. It is observed
that the performance of the ECPM approach is independent on
the interference from the host image. It is also found to be more

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Fig. 17.
to 30.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 14, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2005

BER performance comparison for different sequence lengths between ISS scheme and ECPM under the JPEG compression with the quality factor equal

robust than the conventional SS watermarking schemes in blind

watermarking, especially when a higher payload is required.
Computer simulations show that the ECPM approach has a satisfactory performance under various attacks, including image
rotation, cropping, median ltering and JPEG compression.
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Siyue Chen (S00) received the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, in 2001. She is
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary.
Her research interests include chaos, multimedia signal processing, digital
watermarking, and data hiding.

Henry Leung (M90) received the Ph.D. degree

in electrical and computer engineering from the
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
He is currently a Professor with the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University
of Calgary. He was with the Defence Research
Establishment Ottawa, ON, where he was involved
in the design of automated systems for air and maritime multisensor surveillance. His research interests
include chaos, computational intelligence, data
mining, nonlinear signal processing, multimedia,
radar, sensor fusion, and wireless communications.