Reversible watermarking techniques extract the watermark and recover the original image from the watermarked image without any distortion. They have been applied for those sensitive fields, such as the medicine and the military. In this thesis, a novel watermarking algorithm using multi-prediction values has been proposed. It exploits the correlation between the original pixel and the neighboring pixels to obtain twelve prediction candidates, and then selects a candidate as the prediction value according to the original pixel and the temporary prediction value. Due to the algorithm use the original pixel as one of the parameters to decide the prediction value, our prediction values are obtained with great precision. The experimental results reveal that the performance of our proposed method outperforms that proposed by Sachnev. For example the variance of the prediction errors histogram obtained by the proposed method is less than that obtained by the algorithm proposed by Sachnev et al. about 44.2%; the mean PSNR greater than about 1.47 dB and 1.1 dB under the watermark capacity 0~0.04 bpp and 0.04~0.5 bpp, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method is especially appropriate for embedding watermark in low or medium capacity. Keyword¡G reversible watermarking, watermarking, prediction, histogram shifting.

Modern technologies have eased the way for adversaries to bypass the conventional identity authentication and identification processes; hence security systems have been developed to a great extent for protection of privacy and security of identities in different applications. The focus of this thesis is digital watermarking, security and privacy, as well as the ability to employ electrocardiogram as a method to enhance the security and privacy level. A high capacity reversible multiple watermarking scheme is introduced to mainly target the medical images. Furthermore, the use of ECG biometric signals in the form of the embedded watermark is studied. Experimental results indicate that the reversible data hiding scheme outperforms other approaches in the literature in terms of payload capacity and marked image quality. Results from the ECG mark embedding also show that no major degradation in performance is noticeable compared to the case where no watermarking is needed.

Modern technologies have eased the way for adversaries to bypass the conventional identity authentication and identification processes; hence security systems have been developed to a great extent for protection of privacy and security of identities in different applications. The focus of this thesis is digital watermarking, security and privacy, as well as the ability to employ electrocardiogram as a method to enhance the security and privacy level. A high capacity reversible multiple watermarking scheme is introduced to mainly target the medical images. Furthermore, the use of ECG biometric signals in the form of the embedded watermark is studied. Experimental results indicate that the reversible data hiding scheme outperforms other approaches in the literature in terms of payload capacity and marked image quality. Results from the ECG mark embedding also show that no major degradation in performance is noticeable compared to the case where no watermarking is needed.

Digital watermarking of multimedia content has been proposed as a method for different applications such as copyright protection, content authentication, transaction tracking and data hiding. In this thesis, we propose a lossless watermarking approach based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for a new application of watermarking. A depth map obtained from a stereoscopic image pair is embedded into one of the two images using a reversible watermarking algorithm. Different from existing approaches which hide depth map in spatial domain, the depth information is hidden in the quantized DCT domain of the stereo image in our method. This modification makes the watermarking algorithm compatible with JPEG and MPEG-2 compression. After the investigation of the quantized DCT coefficients distribution of the compressed image and video, The bit-shift operation is utilized to embed the depth map into its associated 2D image reversibly for the purpose of achieving high compression efficiency of the watermarked image and/or video and high visual quality of stereo image and/or video after the depth map is extracted. We implement the proposed method to analyze its performance. The experimental results show that a very high payload of watermark (e.g. depth map) can be embedded into the JPEG compressed image and MPEG-2 video. The compression efficiency is only slightly reduced after the watermark embedding and the quality of the original image or video can be restored completely at the decoder side.

Digital watermarking of multimedia content has been proposed as a method for different applications such as copyright protection, content authentication, transaction tracking and data hiding. In this thesis, we propose a lossless watermarking approach based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for a new application of watermarking. A depth map obtained from a stereoscopic image pair is embedded into one of the two images using a reversible watermarking algorithm. Different from existing approaches which hide depth map in spatial domain, the depth information is hidden in the quantized DCT domain of the stereo image in our method. This modification makes the watermarking algorithm compatible with JPEG and MPEG-2 compression. After the investigation of the quantized DCT coefficients distribution of the compressed image and video, The bit-shift operation is utilized to embed the depth map into its associated 2D image reversibly for the purpose of achieving high compression efficiency of the watermarked image and/or video and high visual quality of stereo image and/or video after the depth map is extracted. We implement the proposed method to analyze its performance. The experimental results show that a very high payload of watermark (e.g. depth map) can be embedded into the JPEG compressed image and MPEG-2 video. The compression efficiency is only slightly reduced after the watermark embedding and the quality of the original image or video can be restored completely at the decoder side.

Reversible watermarking techniques extract the watermark and recover the original image losslessly from the watermarked image. They have been applied to those sensitive fields, such as the medicine and the military. Since an embedding pixel value may exceed the limitation of pixel value during the embedding process, most of the reversible watermarking methods require a location-map to record those pixels for recovering cover images. Although the location-map can be compressed by a lossless compression algorithm, and then embed into the watermarked image, this lowers embedding capacity and increases the complexity of watermarking during the procedures of embedding and extraction. In this thesis, we propose a reversible location-map free of watermarking algorithm. This algorithm first exploits the sorting and the correlation of neighboring pixels to increase the embedding capacity. Next we find thresholds from the predicted values. If the predicted value of an embedding pixel is within the thresholds, we can ensure that the pixel has no underflow or overflow problem during embedding process. Therefore, we can recover the cover image without any distortion. The experimental results reveal that the performance of our proposed method outperforms that proposed by FUJIYOSHI et al. For example, the embedding capacity obtained by the proposed method is higher than that obtained by FUJIYOSHI et al. about 60%, and the PSNR of our scheme is higher than FUJIYOSHI et al. about 5 dB.

Digital watermarking of multimedia content has been proposed as a method for different applications such as copyright protection, content authentication, transaction tracking and data hiding. In this thesis, we propose a lossless watermarking approach based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for a new application of watermarking. A depth map obtained from a stereoscopic image pair is embedded into one of the two images using a reversible watermarking algorithm. Different from existing approaches which hide depth map in spatial domain, the depth information is hidden in the quantized DCT domain of the stereo image in our method. This modification makes the watermarking algorithm compatible with JPEG and MPEG-2 compression. After the investigation of the quantized DCT coefficients distribution of the compressed image and video, The bit-shift operation is utilized to embed the depth map into its associated 2D image reversibly for the purpose of achieving high compression efficiency of the watermarked image and/or video and high visual quality of stereo image and/or video after the depth map is extracted. We implement the proposed method to analyze its performance. The experimental results show that a very high payload of watermark (e.g. depth map) can be embedded into the JPEG compressed image and MPEG-2 video. The compression efficiency is only slightly reduced after the watermark embedding and the quality of the original image or video can be restored completely at the decoder side.

Digital watermarking of multimedia content has been proposed as a method for different applications such as copyright protection, content authentication, transaction tracking and data hiding. In this thesis, we propose a lossless watermarking approach based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for a new application of watermarking. A depth map obtained from a stereoscopic image pair is embedded into one of the two images using a reversible watermarking algorithm. Different from existing approaches which hide depth map in spatial domain, the depth information is hidden in the quantized DCT domain of the stereo image in our method. This modification makes the watermarking algorithm compatible with JPEG and MPEG-2 compression. After the investigation of the quantized DCT coefficients distribution of the compressed image and video, The bit-shift operation is utilized to embed the depth map into its associated 2D image reversibly for the purpose of achieving high compression efficiency of the watermarked image and/or video and high visual quality of stereo image and/or video after the depth map is extracted. We implement the proposed method to analyze its performance. The experimental results show that a very high payload of watermark (e.g. depth map) can be embedded into the JPEG compressed image and MPEG-2 video. The compression efficiency is only slightly reduced after the watermark embedding and the quality of the original image or video can be restored completely at the decoder side.