Hardware Implementation of Adaptive Watermarking Based on Local Spatial Disorder Analysis
This work addresses the need for efficient ownership protection in multimedia applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing watermarking methods with hardware optimizations.
The paper tackled the problem of real-time watermarking for multimedia content protection by proposing an adaptive hardware implementation that embeds watermarks in different bit-planes based on local spatial disorder analysis, resulting in transparent and robust watermarked images with low complexity as demonstrated on an FPGA device.
With the increasing use of the internet and the ease of exchange of multimedia content, the protection of ownership rights has become a significant concern. Watermarking is an efficient means for this purpose. In many applications, real-time watermarking is required, which demands hardware implementation of low complexity and robust algorithm. In this paper, an adaptive watermarking is presented, which uses embedding in different bit-planes to achieve transparency and robustness. Local disorder of pixels is analyzed to control the strength of the watermark. A new low complexity method for disorder analysis is proposed, and its hardware implantation is presented. An embedding method is proposed, which causes lower degradation in the watermarked image. Also, the performance of proposed watermarking architecture is improved by a pipe-line structure and is tested on an FPGA device. Results show that the algorithm produces transparent and robust watermarked images. The synthesis report from FPGA implementation illustrates a low complexity hardware structure.