Chang D. Yoo

Reversible Image Watermarking Based on Integer-to-Integer Wavelet Transform

This paper proposes a high capacity reversible image watermarking scheme based on integer-to-integer wavelet transforms. The proposed scheme divides an input image into nonoverlapping blocks and embeds a watermark into the high-frequency wavelet coefficients of each block. The conditions to avoid both underflow and overflow in the spatial domain are derived for an arbitrary wavelet and block size. The payload to be embedded includes not only messages but also side information used to reconstruct the exact original image. To minimize the mean-squared distortion between the original and the watermarked images given a payload, the watermark is adaptively embedded into the image. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher embedding capacity while maintaining distortion at a lower level than the existing reversible watermarking schemes.

Image watermarking based on invariant regions of scale-space representation

This paper proposes a novel content-based image watermarking method based on invariant regions of an image. The invariant regions are self-adaptive image patches that deform with geometric transformations. Three different invariant-region detection methods based on the scale-space representation of an image were considered for watermarking. At each invariant region, the watermark is embedded after geometric normalization according to the shape of the region. By binding watermarking with invariant regions, resilience against geometric transformations can be readily obtained. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust against various image processing steps, including geometric transformations, cropping, filtering, and JPEG compression.

A robust image fingerprinting system using the Radon transform

With the ever-increasing use of multimedia contents through electronic commerce and on-line services, the problems associated with the protection of intellectual property, management of large database and indexation of content are becoming more prominent. Watermarking has been considered as efficient means to these problems. Although watermarking is a powerful tool, there are some issues with the use of it, such as the modification of the content and its security. With respect to this, identifying content itself based on its own features rather than watermarking can be an alternative solution to these problems. The aim of fingerprinting is to provide fast and reliable methods for content identification. In this paper, we present a new approach for image fingerprinting using the Radon transform to make the fingerprint robust against affine transformations. Since it is quite easy with modern computers to apply affine transformations to audio, image and video, there is an obvious necessity for affine transformation resilient fingerprinting. Experimental results show that the proposed fingerprints are highly robust against most signal processing transformations. Besides robustness, we also address other issues such as pairwise independence, database search efficiency and key dependence of the proposed method.

Robust Video Fingerprinting for Content-Based Video Identification

Video fingerprints are feature vectors that uniquely characterize one video clip from another. The goal of video fingerprinting is to identify a given video query in a database (DB) by measuring the distance between the query fingerprint and the fingerprints in the DB. The performance of a video fingerprinting system, which is usually measured in terms of pairwise independence and robustness, is directly related to the fingerprint that the system uses. In this paper, a novel video fingerprinting method based on the centroid of gradient orientations is proposed. The centroid of gradient orientations is chosen due to its pairwise independence and robustness against common video processing steps that include lossy compression, resizing, frame rate change, etc. A threshold used to reliably determine a fingerprint match is theoretically derived by modeling the proposed fingerprint as a stationary ergodic process, and the validity of the model is experimentally verified. The performance of the proposed fingerprint is experimentally evaluated and compared with that of other widely-used features. The experimental results show that the proposed fingerprint outperforms the considered features in the context of video fingerprinting.

Underdetermined Blind Source Separation Based on Subspace Representation

This paper considers the problem of blindly separating sub- and super-Gaussian sources from underdetermined mixtures. The underlying sources are assumed to be composed of two orthogonal components: one lying in the rowspace and the other in the nullspace of a mixing matrix. The mapping from the rowspace component to the mixtures by the mixing matrix is invertible using the pseudo-inverse of the mixing matrix. The mapping from the nullspace component to zero by the mixing matrix is noninvertible, and there are infinitely many solutions to the nullspace component. The latent nullspace component, which is of lower complexity than the underlying sources, is estimated based on a mean square error (MSE) criterion. This leads to a source estimator that is optimal in the MSE sense. In order to characterize and model sub- and super-Gaussian source distributions, the parametric generalized Gaussian distribution is used. The distribution parameters are estimated based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. When the mixing matrix is unavailable, it must be estimated, and a novel algorithm based on a single source detection algorithm, which detects time-frequency regions of single-source-occupancy, is proposed. In our simulations, the proposed algorithm, compared to other conventional algorithms, estimated the mixing matrix with higher accuracy and separated various sources with higher signal-to-interference ratio.

Localized image watermarking based on feature points of scale-space representation

This paper proposes a novel method for content-based watermarking based on feature points of an image. At each feature point, the watermark is embedded after scale normalization according to the local characteristic scale. Characteristic scale is the maximum scale of the scale-space representation of an image at the feature point. By binding watermarking with the local characteristics of an image, resilience against affine transformations can be obtained easily. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust against various image processing steps including affine transformations, cropping, filtering and JPEG compression.

Audio fingerprinting based on normalized spectral subband moments

The performance of a fingerprinting system, which is often measured in terms of reliability and robustness, is directly related to the features that the system uses. In this letter, we present a new audio-fingerprinting method based on the normalized spectral subband moments. A threshold used to reliably determine a fingerprint match is obtained by modeling the features as a stationary process. The robustness of the normalized moments was evaluated experimentally and compared with that of the spectral flatness measure. Among the considered subband features, the first-order normalized moment showed the best performance for fingerprinting.

Audio fingerprinting based on normalized spectral subband centroids

For multimedia fingerprinting, it is crucial to extract relevant features that allow direct access to the distinguishing characteristics of a multimedia object. Features used for fingerprinting directly relate to the performance of the entire fingerprinting system. The paper proposes a novel audio fingerprinting method based on normalized spectral subband centroids. The spectral subband centroid is selected due to its resilience against equalization, compression, and noise addition. Both reliability and robustness issues in the fingerprinting system are addressed. Experimental results show that the proposed method is not only reliable, but also robust against various audio processing steps, including MP3 compression, equalization, random start, time-scale modification, and linear speed change.

Image Segmentation Using Higher-Order Correlation Clustering.

In this paper, a hypergraph-based image segmentation framework is formulated in a supervised manner for many high-level computer vision tasks. To consider short- and long-range dependency among various regions of an image and also to incorporate wider selection of features, a higher-order correlation clustering (HO-CC) is incorporated in the framework. Correlation clustering (CC), which is a graph-partitioning algorithm, was recently shown to be effective in a number of applications such as natural language processing, document clustering, and image segmentation. It derives its partitioning result from a pairwise graph by optimizing a global objective function such that it simultaneously maximizes both intra-cluster similarity and inter-cluster dissimilarity. In the HO-CC, the pairwise graph which is used in the CC is generalized to a hypergraph which can alleviate local boundary ambiguities that can occur in the CC. Fast inference is possible by linear programming relaxation, and effective parameter learning by structured support vector machine is also possible by incorporating a decomposable structured loss function. Experimental results on various data sets show that the proposed HO-CC outperforms other state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms. The HO-CC framework is therefore an efficient and flexible image segmentation framework.

Video Fingerprinting Based on Centroids of Gradient Orientations

Fingerprints are feature vectors that can uniquely characterize the video signal. The goal of a video fingerprinting system is to judge whether two videos have the same contents by measuring distance between fingerprints extracted from the videos. In this paper, a novel video fingerprinting method based on the centroids of gradient orientations is proposed. The centroid of gradient orientations is chosen due to its reliability and robustness against common video processing steps. A threshold used to reliably determine a fingerprint match is theoretically derived, and its validity is experimentally verified. The experimental results show that the proposed fingerprint is not only pairwise independent but also robust against common video processing steps