Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Būtinybė apsaugoti autorinių teisių savininkus nuo neteisėto intelektinės nuosavybės naudojimosi ir platinimo vis didėja. Tam puikiai tinka skaitmeniniai vandens ženklai, kurie ne tik apsaugo nuo neleistino intelektinės nuosavybės naudojimosi, bet pasinaudojus vandens ženklais galima susekti neteisėtą vartotoją. Šiame darbe aptarta diskrečioji kosinuso transformacija (angl. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)) ir išplėsto spektro (angl. Spread-Spectrum) ženklinimo vandens ženklais metodai, plačiau išnagrinėtas DCT metodas ir patikrinta keletas paprastų vaizdo atakų, kaip antai: karpymas, suspaudimas, pasukimas ir pan. Dalies vaizdo iškirpimas, pasukimas gali neatpažįstamai pakeisti vandens ženklą. Taip nutinka, nes iš pakeisto paveikslėlio ištraukiant vandens ženklą priešingu įterpimui metodu pasikeičia vaizdo taškų koordinatės, o iškirpus dalies koordinačių trūksta. Priklausomai nuo posūkio kampo ar iškirptos dalies dydžio sugadinamas ir vandens ženklas, kuris nepasikeičia keičiant spalvą ar kontrastą. / The necessity to protect copyright owners from using and sharing illegal intellectual property still grows. Digital water marks fits perfectly for this matter. They not only prevent using illegal intellectual property, but they can also detect illegal user. In this paper the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and spread-spectrum water-marking methods were discussed, and DCT method was analysed, and several image attacks were tested, such as: trimming, compression, rotation and etc. The trimming a part of an image, rotation of an image can change water mark beyond recognition. It happens because taking water mark out from changed image using inverse method of insertion image pixel coordinates change, and trimming causes a missing of part of coordinates. Depending on the angle of rotation or the size of a trimmed part a water mark is corrupted, but it does not change when a colour or a contrast is being changed.

Safeguarding creative content in a digital form has become increasingly difficult. It is progressively easier to copy, modify and redistribute digital media, which causes great declines in business profits. For example, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates that in 2001 the worldwide sales of pirated music CDs were 475 million US dollars. While a large amount of time and money is committed to creating intellectual property, legal means have not proven to be sufficient for the protection of this property. Digital watermarking is a steganographic technique that has been proposed as a possible solution to this problem. A digital watermark hides embedded information about the origin, status, owner and/or destination of the data, often without the knowledge of the viewer or user. This dissertation examines a technique for digital watermarking which utilizes properties of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Research has been done in this field, but which wavelet family is superior is not adequately addressed. This dissertation studies the influence of the wavelet family when using a blind, nonvisible watermark in digital media. The digital watermarking algorithm uses a database of multiple images with diverse properties. Various watermarks are embedded. Eight different families of wavelets with dissimilar properties are compared. How effective is each wavelet? To objectively measure the success of the algorithm, the influence of the mother wavelet, the imperceptibility of the embedded watermark and the readability of the extracted watermark, the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio and the Image Quality Index for each wavelet family and image are obtained. Two common categories of digital watermarking attacks are removing the watermark and rendering the watermark undetectable. To simulate and examine the effect of attacks on the images, noise is added to the image data. Also, to test the effect of reducing an image in size, each image containing the embedded watermark is compressed. The dissertation asks the questions: “Is the wavelet family chosen to implement the algorithm for a blind, nonvisible watermark in digital images of consequence? If so, which family is superior?” This dissertation conclusively shows that the Haar transform is the best for blind, non-visible digital watermarking.

One of the main features of digital technology is that the digital media can be duplicated and reproduced easily. However, this allows unauthorized and illegal use of information, i.e. data piracy. To protect digital media against illegal attempts a signal, called watermark, is embedded into the multimedia data in a robust and invisible manner. A watermark is a short sequence of information, which contains owner&rsquo / s identity. It is used for evidence of ownership and copyright purposes. In this thesis, we use fractional Fourier transformation (FrFT) domain, which combines space and spatial frequency domains, for watermark embedding and implement well-known secure spread spectrum watermarking approach. However, the spread spectrum watermarking scheme is fragile against geometrical attacks such as rotation and scaling. To gain robustness against geometrical attacks, an invisible template is inserted into the watermarked image in Fourier transformation domain. The template contains no information in itself but it is used to detect the transformations undergone by the image. Once the template is detected, these transformations are inverted and the watermark signal is decoded. Watermark embedding is performed by considering the masking characteristics of the Human Visual System, to ensure the watermark invisibility. In addition, we implement watermarking algorithms, which use different transformation domains such as discrete cosine transformation domain, discrete Fourier transformation domain and discrete wavelet transformation domain for watermark embedding. The performance of these algorithms and the FrFT domain watermarking scheme is experimented against various attacks and distortions, and their robustness are compared.

In this thesis, we address the problem of digital intellectual property (IP) protection for the field programmable gate array (FPGA) designs. Substantial time and effort is required to the design complex circuits; thus, it makes sense to re-use these designs. An IP developer can sell his design to the companies and collect royalty. However, he needs to protect his work from security breach and piracy. The legal means of IP protection such as patents and license agreements are a deterrent to illegal IP circulation, but they are insufficient to detect an IP protection breach. Watermarking provides a means to identify the owner of a design. Firstly, we propose a watermarking technique that modifies the routing of an FPGA design to make it a function of the signature text. This watermarking technique is a type of constraint-based watermarking technique where we add a signature-based term to the routing cost function. Secondly, we need a method to verify the existence of the watermark in the design. To address this we propose a digital signature generation technique. This technique uses the switch state (ON/OFF) of certain switches on the routing to uniquely identify a design. Our results show less than 10% speed overhead for a minimum channel width routing. Increasing the channel width by unit length, we could watermark the design with a zero speed overhead. The increase in the wire length is negative for majority of the circuits. Our watermarking technique can be integrated into the current routing algorithm since it does not require an additional step for embedding the watermark. The overall design effort for routing a watermarked design is equivalent to that of routing a non-watermarked design.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Texas, May, 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Thesis (DPhil (Information Science))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Information Science / unrestricted

Analog technology has been around for a long time. The use of analog technology is necessary since we live in an analog world. However, the transmission and storage of analog technology is more complicated and in many cases less efficient than digital technology. Digital technology, on the other hand, provides fast means to be transmitted and stored. Digital technology continues to grow and it is more widely used than ever before. However, with the advent of new technology that can reproduce digital documents or images with unprecedented accuracy, it poses a risk to the intellectual rights of many artists and also on personal security. One way to protect intellectual rights of digital works is by embedding watermarks in them. The watermarks can be visible or invisible depending on the application and the final objective of the intellectual work. This thesis deals with watermarking images in the discrete wavelet transform domain. The watermarking process was done using the JPEG2000 compression standard as a platform. The hardware implementation was achieved using the ALTERA DSP Builder and SIMULINK software to program the DE2 ALTERA FPGA board. The JPEG2000 color transform and the wavelet transformation blocks were implemented using the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration.

Due to the accelerated growth in digital music distribution, it becomes easy to modify, intercept, and distribute material illegally. To overcome the urgent need for copyright protection against piracy, several audio watermarking schemes have been proposed and implemented. These digital audio watermarking schemes have the purpose of embedding inaudible information within the host file to cover copyright and authentication issues. This thesis proposes an audio watermarking model using MATLAB® and Simulink® software for 1K and 2K fast Fourier transform (FFT) lengths. The watermark insertion process is performed in the frequency domain to guarantee the imperceptibility of the watermark to the human auditory system. Additionally, the proposed audio watermarking model was implemented in a Cyclone® II FPGA device from Altera® using the Altera® DSP Builder tool and MATLAB/Simulink® software. To evaluate the performance of the proposed audio watermarking scheme, effectiveness and fidelity performance tests were conducted for the proposed software and hardware-in-the-loop based audio watermarking model.

Cette thèse traite de ce verrou théorique pour des vidéos naturelles. Les contributions scientifiques développées ont permis : 1. De réfuter mathématiquement le modèle gaussien en général adopté dans la littérature pour représenter le bruit de canal ; 2. D’établir pour la première fois, le caractère stationnaire des processus aléatoires représentant le bruit de canal, la méthode développée étant indépendante du type de données, de leur traitement et de la procédure d’estimation ; 3. De proposer une méthodologie de modélisation du bruit de canal à partir d’un mélange de gaussiennes pour une transformée aussi bien en cosinus discrète qu’en ondelette discrète et pour un large ensemble d’attaques (filtrage, rotation, compression, StirMark, …). L’intérêt de cette approche est entre autres de permettre le calcul exact de la capacité du canal alors que la littérature ne fournissait que des bornes supérieure et inférieure. 4. Les contributions technologique concernent l’intégration et l’implémentions de ces modèles dans la méthode du tatouage IProtect brevetée Institut Télécom/ARTEMIS et SFR avec un gain en temps d’exécution d’un facteur 100 par rapport à l’état de l’art. / The thesis is focus on natural video and attack modelling for uncompressed video watermarking purposes. By reconsidering a statistical investigation combining four types of statistical tests, the thesis starts by identifying with accuracy the drawbacks and limitations of the popular Gaussian model in watermarking applications. Further on, an advanced statistical approach is developed in order to establish with mathematical rigour: 1. That a mathematical model for the original video content and/or attacks exists; 2. The model parameters. From the theoretical point of view, this means to prove for the first time the stationarity of the random processes representing the natural video and/or the watermarking attacks. These general results have been already validated under applicative and theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, when integrating the attack models into the IProtect watermarking method patented by Institut Télécom/ARTEMIS and SFR, a speed-up by a factor of 100 of the insertion procedure has been obtained. On the other hand, accurate models for natural video and attacks allowed the increasing of the precision in the computation of some basic information theory entities (entropies and capacity).