Wei-Hung Lin

An Efficient Watermarking Method Based on Significant Difference of Wavelet Coefficient Quantization

This paper proposes a blind watermarking algorithm based on the significant difference of wavelet coefficient quantization for copyright protection. Every seven nonoverlap wavelet coefficients of the host image are grouped into a block. The largest two coefficients in a block are called significant coefficients in this paper and their difference is called significant difference. We quantized the local maximum wavelet coefficient in a block by comparing the significant difference value in a block with the average significant difference value in all blocks. The maximum wavelet coefficients are so quantized that their significant difference between watermark bit 0 and watermark bit 1 exhibits a large energy difference which can be used for watermark extraction. During the extraction, an adaptive threshold value is designed to extract the watermark from the watermarked image under different attacks. We compare the adaptive threshold value to the significant difference which was quantized in a block to determine the watermark bit. The experimental results show that the proposed method is quite effective against JPEG compression, low-pass filtering, and Gaussian noise; the PSNR value of a watermarked image is greater than 40 dB.

A blind watermarking method using maximum wavelet coefficient quantization

This paper proposes a blind watermarking algorithm based on maximum wavelet coefficient quantization for copyright protection. The wavelet coefficients are grouped into different block size and blocks are randomly selected from different subbands. We add different energies to the maximum wavelet coefficient under the constraint that the maximum wavelet coefficient is always maximum in a block. The watermark is embedded the local maximum coefficient which can effectively resist attacks. Also, using the block-based watermarking, we can extract the watermark without using the original image or watermark. Experimental results show that the proposed method is quite robust under either non-geometry or geometry attacks.

A wavelet-tree-based watermarking method using distance vector of binary cluster

This paper proposes a wavelet-tree-based watermarking method using distance vector of binary cluster for copyright protection. In the proposed method, wavelet trees are classified into two clusters using the distance vector to denote binary watermark bits. The two smallest wavelet coefficients in a wavelet tree are used to reduce distortion of a watermarked image. The distance vector, which is obtained from the two smallest coefficients of a wavelet tree, is quantized to decrease image distortion. The trees are classified into two clusters so that they exhibit a sufficiently large statistical difference based on the distance vector, which difference is then used for subsequent watermark extraction. We compare the statistical difference and the distance vector of a wavelet tree to decide which watermark bit is embedded in the embedding process. The experimental results show that the watermarked image looks visually identical to the original and the watermark can be effectively extracted upon image processing attacks.

An intelligent watermarking method based on particle swarm optimization

Meerwald, Koidl, and Uhl (2009) pointed out that the method proposed in Lin et al. (2008) exists potential insecurity. This paper proposes an intelligent watermarking by invoking particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique in wavelet domain to overcome the revealed insecurity issue, furthermore resolve the conflict between imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking. In the proposed method, PSO is fused with the method proposed in Lin et al. (2008) (denoted SDWCQ) to avoid potentially insecurity in Lin et al. (2008). That is, the method of using the fixed block size in one subband and the permutation is unable to disguise which coefficients make up a block. The attacker can utilize the insecure property and analyze the significant difference between bipolar watermarks in Lin et al. (2008) to detect the embedded blocks, furthermore modify the significant difference, and result in unable to extract the watermark. In this paper, coefficients are randomly selected from different subbands to make up a block to promote the disguise. Performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm obviously outperforms SDWCQ which does not use PSO.

Image copyright protection with forward error correction

A copyright protection method for digital image with 1/T rate forward error correction (FEC) is proposed in this paper. In this method, the original image is lossless and the watermark is robust to malicious attacks including geometric attacks such as scaling, rotation, cropping, print-photocopy-scan, and scaling-cropping attacks and nongeometric attacks such as low-pass filtering, sharpening, JPEG compression attacks. The watermark logo is fused with noise bits to improve the security, and later XORed with the feature value of the image by 1/T rate FEC. During extraction, the watermark bits are determined by majority voting, and the extraction procedure needs neither the original image nor the watermark logo. Experimental results show that not only the image is lossless but also the proposed method can effectively resist the common malicious attacks. Since the proposed method is based on spatial domain and there is no need to do frequency transform, the embedding and extraction performances are quite improved.

A sliding window technique for efficient license plate localization based on discrete wavelet transform

Real-time license plate recognition (LPR) is an interesting but complicated research topic. Some previous works use discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to extract license plate (LP), however, most of them are not capable of dealing with complex environments such as the low-contrast source images and the dynamic-range problems. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for license plate localization (LPL) based on DWT. The LP can be extracted from different quality of source images under complex environments by using two frequency subbands. We first use the HL subband to search the features of LP and then verify the features by checking whether in the LH subband there exists a horizontal line around the feature or not. The proposed method can extract both front and back LPs of various vehicles. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve good LPL results with both short run-time and high accurate detection rate.

An efficient wavelet-tree-based watermarking method

This paper proposes a blind watermarking scheme based on wavelet tree quantization for copyright protection. In such a quantization scheme, there exists a large significant difference while embedding a watermark bit 1 and a watermark bit 0; it then does not require any original image or watermark during watermark extraction process. As a result, the watermarked images look lossless in comparison with the original ones, and the proposed method can effectively resist common image processing attacks; especially for JPEG compression and low-pass filtering. Moreover, by designing an adaptive threshold value in the extraction process, our method is more robust for resisting common attacks such as median filtering, average filtering, and Gaussian noise. Experimental results show that the watermarked image looks visually identical to the original, and the watermark can be effectively extracted.

A Blind Watermarking Scheme Based on Wavelet Tree Quantization

This paper proposes a blind watermarking scheme based on wavelet tree quantization for copyright protection. In such a quantization scheme, there exists a large significant difference while embedding a watermark bit 1 and a watermark bit 0; it then does not require any original image or watermark during the watermark extraction. As a result, the watermarked images look lossless in comparison with the original ones, and the proposed method can effectively resist common image processing attacks; especially for JPEG compression and low-pass filtering. Moreover, by designing an adaptive threshold value in the extraction process, our method is more robust for resisting common attacks such as median filtering, average filtering, and Gaussian noise. Experimental results show that the watermarked image looks visually identical to the original, and the watermark can be effectively extracted even after either an unintentional image processing or intentional image attacks.

Fast License Plate Localization Using Discrete Wavelet Transform

Some previous works use discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to extract license plate (LP), however, most of them are not capable of dealing with complex environments such as the low-contrast source images and the dynamic-range problems. In this paper, we propose a license plate localization (LPL) algorithm based on DWT. The LP can be extracted from complex environments and different quality of source images by using two frequency subbands. We first use the HL subband to search the features of LP and then verify the features by checking whether a horizontal line around the feature exists in the LH subband or not.The proposed method can extract both front and back LPs of various vehicles. The experiments show that the proposed method can achieve good LPL results with both short run-time and high accurate detection rate.

A blind PSO watermarking using wavelet trees quantization

A blind watermarking method with particle swam optimization (PSO) on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is: proposed. The watermark is embedded in a digital image by quantization of adjacent wavelet coefficients on wavelet trees and can be extracted blindly. We employ PSO to achieve the robustness and imperceptibility. The experimental results show that using PSO is an improvement over those without using PSO.