Digital watermarking is the way to solve digital image copyright protection problem. Such a solution is quite new and the need for software, which would ensure image authentication, is huge. Image authentication control area and its relevance are analyzed in this work. Digital watermarking theoretical basics are presented; six algorithms – Cox, Kim, Wang, Xia, Dugad and Zhu – are analyzed. The analysis of similar software was performed; it revealed the predominance of such software products that allows only visible (though transparent) watermarking, and the number of software with a possibility of invisible watermarking is small. The work consists of these main parts: analysis, design, user documentation and experimental research. The main objective of this work was to design and implement image authentication control system. This system has such features: PGM and JPEG format images review, digital watermark generation, embedding, extraction.

The advances in recording, editing and broadcasting multimedia content in digital form motivate the protection of digital information against illegal use, manipulation and distribution. This thesis work focuses on one aspect of digital rights management (DRM), namely digital watermarking. Specifically, we study its use in copy protection, tamper detection and information hiding. We introduce three application-specific digital watermarking techniques. The first two algorithms, based on embedding film grain like noise and signal dependent watermarks, respectively, are designed for authentication applications. The advantage is that they are able to detect malicious tampering while being robust against content-preserving processes such as compression, filtering and additive noise. The third method, a reversible watermarking technique, is designed so that sensitive personal information can be embedded in medical images. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms other approaches in the available literature in terms of image quality and computational complexity.

The advances in recording, editing and broadcasting multimedia content in digital form motivate the protection of digital information against illegal use, manipulation and distribution. This thesis work focuses on one aspect of digital rights management (DRM), namely digital watermarking. Specifically, we study its use in copy protection, tamper detection and information hiding. We introduce three application-specific digital watermarking techniques. The first two algorithms, based on embedding film grain like noise and signal dependent watermarks, respectively, are designed for authentication applications. The advantage is that they are able to detect malicious tampering while being robust against content-preserving processes such as compression, filtering and additive noise. The third method, a reversible watermarking technique, is designed so that sensitive personal information can be embedded in medical images. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms other approaches in the available literature in terms of image quality and computational complexity.

Thesis (PhDElectronicEngineering)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 195-202.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Information and Communication Sciences, Department of Computing, 2008. / Bibliography: p. 144-153.

Thesis (M. S.)--Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Committee Chair: Dr. Lee, Hsien-Hsin S.; Committee Member: Dr. Lim, Sung-Kyu; Committee Member: Dr. Yalamanchili, Sudhakar.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-92). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-64). Also available in electronic version.

Due to the rapid development of 3D display market, the protection and authentication of the intellectual property rights of 3D multimedia has become an essential concern. As a consequence, the digital watermarking for 3D image and video is attracting considerable attention. The depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) technique has been playing a critical role in 3D contents representation because of its numerous advantages. A good digital watermarking algorithm should be robust to various possible attacks, including geometric distortions and compressions. And di erent from ordinary 2D digital watermarking, there are more speci c requirements for 3D watermarking, especially for DIBR 3D image watermarking. Not only the center view, but also the virtual left and right views can be illegally distributed. Therefore, the embedded watermark information should be accurately extracted from these three views individually for content authentication, even under attacks. In this thesis, we focus on the research of digital watermarking and watermarking based quality evaluation for DIBR 3D images. We first present a 2D image and video watermarking method based on contourlet transform, which is then extended to a robust contourlet-based watermarking algorithm for DIBR 3D images. The watermark is embedded into the center view by quantizing certain contourlet coe cients. The virtual left and right views are synthesized from the watermarked center view and the corresponding depth map. One advantage of our algorithm is its simplicity and practicality. However, the performance on watermark extraction needs to be further improved. As an improvement, a blind watermarking algorithm for DIBR 3D images based on feature regions and ridgelet transform is proposed. The watermarked view has good perceptual quality under both the objective and subjective image quality measures. Compared with other related and state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm shows superiority in terms of watermark extraction and robustness to various attacks. Furthermore, as one of the most promising techniques for quality evaluation, a watermarking based quality evaluation scheme is developed for DIBR 3D images. The qualities of the watermarked center view and the synthesized left and right views under distortions can be estimated by examining the degradation of corresponding extracted watermarks. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme has good performance of quality evaluation for DIBR 3D images under the attacks.