Gordon W. Braudaway

Effective and ineffective digital watermarks

We have entered an era where inexpensive and readily-available equipment can produce perfect copies of digital multimedia materials, such as CD-quality audio, publication-quality images, or digital video. In this environment, it has become easier for malicious parties to make salable copies of copyrighted content without compensation to the content owner. Many media content owners are concerned about the potential loss of revenue from multimedia piracy, especially when the content will be exposed to the Internet. Digital watermarking is seen by many as a potential solution to this problem. Many different watermarking schemes have been proposed. Often, however there is little discussion of how effective a proposed watermarking technique may be at solving a particular problem. We describe a number of proposed image-watermarking application scenarios and form a small number of watermark-application categories. Then, with these applications in mind, we discuss the desired technical properties of watermarks for each category. Finally we discuss some watermarking techniques developed by the authors, in light of the desired properties.

If one watermark is good, are more better?

Invisible watermarks are not all alike. Different techniques are used to embed different types of watermarks into digital media objects to accomplish different goals. Some watermarks are intended to robustly carry ownership information; some are intended to carry content-verification information; and some are intended to convey side information, or captions. Some opportunities to employ multiple watermarks to convey multiple sets of information, intended to satisfy differing or similar goals, are examined. Problems presented by the insertion of multiple watermarks are discussed. Progress towards developing techniques that embed multiple watermarks into an image are also presented.

Digital watermarking for high-quality imaging

In this paper, we address the requirements, techniques and applications of digital watermarking for high-quality images. We present several classes of digital watermarking techniques defined by their appearance and application domains, specify the requirements, and summarize the current research efforts in the Image Library Applications group of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center on digital watermarking of high-quality images. We hope that by addressing these issues, we can both provide a foundation for the next generation of digital watermarking techniques, and a vision for their future applications.

Populating the Hermitage Museum's new web site

Experts from around the world tackle one of the most ambitious Web-based museum projects and the result captures the true artistry of teamwork, technology, and yes, art.

Results of attacks on a claimed robust digital image watermark

Placing either a visible or invisible mark on a document to help establish its ownership is not a new or revolutionary concept. For hundreds of years, owners of important documents or works of art have imprinted identifying marks onto them, not only to help establish their ownership, but also to discourage those who might wish to misappropriate the work. Today, invisible watermarking of digital images is attempted for those same purposes. To be useful, an ownership watermark must robustly survive and be detectable after any manipulation that does not damage a digital image beyond usability. In the extreme, the watermark must survive the printing and rescanning of the image. Additionally, the probability of detecting a watermark in an image that does not have one must be vanishingly small. An embodiment of invisible watermarking claiming to have these properties has been presented previously by the author. This paper reports the results of typical image manipulations and deliberate attacks on robust invisible watermarks of the type reported. Image manipulations include lossy JPEG compression, small angle rotation, linear and nonlinear resizing, cropping, and sharpening. Attacks include the superposition of uncorrelated noise fields, overmarking, and RSS alterations.

Automatic visible watermarking of images

Visible image watermarking has become an important and widely used technique to identify ownership and protect copyrights to images. A visible image watermark immediately identifies the owner of an image, and if properly constructed, can deter subsequent unscrupulous use of the image. The insertion of a visible watermark should satisfy two conflicting conditions: the intensity of the watermark should be strong enough to be perceptible, yet it should be light enough to be unobtrusive and not mar the beauty of the original image. Typically such an adjustment is made manually, and human intervention is required to set the intensity of the watermark at the right level. This is fine for a few images, but is unsuitable for a large collection of images. Thus, it is desirable to have a technique to automatically adjust the intensity of the watermark based on some underlying property of each image. This will allow a large number of images to be automatically watermarked, this increasing the throughput of the watermarking stage. In this paper we show that the measurement of image texture can be successfully used to automate the adjustment of watermark intensity. A linear regression model is used to predict subjective assessments of correct watermark intensity based on image texture measurements.

Application of invisible image watermarks to produce remotely printed, duplication-resistant, and demonstrably authentic documents

A secure Internet infrastructure and IBM image watermarking technology have been integrated for the production and authentication of duplication-resistant hard copy documents that may be transmitted to remote sites before being printed. Envisioned applications include the issuance of certificates, contracts, public records, receipts, coupons, ...even college transcripts.

Evolution of a high-quality digital imaging system

A digital imaging system that produces high image quality is not created by inspirational design alone, but evolves over time as the challenges posed by new applications are met. Our experience over the last ten years have led to a versatile high quality imaging systems. In this talk, we will describe some of the system challenges encountered and the enhancements incorporated to address them.

Workload characterization and optimization of high-performance text indexing on the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.)

In this paper we examine text indexing on the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.), an emerging workload on an emerging multicore architecture. The Cell Broadband Engine is a microprocessor jointly developed by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM (herein, we refer to it simply as the “Cell”).

Accelerating Computational Fluid Dynamics on the IBM Blue Gene/P Supercomputer

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an increasingly important application domain for computational scientists. In this paper, we propose and analyze optimizations necessary to run CFD simulations consisting of multi-billion-cell mesh models on large processor systems. Our investigation leverages the general industrial Navier-Stokes open-source CFD application, Code_Saturne, developed by Electricité de France (EDF). Our work considers emerging processor features such as many-core, Symmetric Multi-threading (SMT), Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), Transactional Memory, and Thread Level Speculation. Initially, we have targeted per-node performance improvements by reconstructing the code and data layouts to optimally use multiple threads. We present a general loop transformation that will enable the compiler to generate OpenMP threads effectively with minimal impact to overall code structure. A renumbering scheme for mesh faces is proposed to enhance thread-level parallelism and generally improve data locality. Performance results on IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer and Intel Xeon Westmere cluster are included.