Echizen Laboratory National Institute of Informatics (NII)

 

Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo

 

Department of Informatics, School of Multidisciplinary Sciences,
The Graduate University For Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI)

Information hiding

Color picture Watermarking Survivability to Wide Range of Geometrical Transformations | Maintaining picture quality of color picture watermarking based on human visual system | Reversible acoustic information hiding for integrity verification

Color picture Watermarking Survivability to Wide Range of Geometrical Transformations (collaboration with the University of Electro-Communications)

 We have developed a robust video watermarking method that can embed watermarks immune to not only rotation, scaling, and translation but also to random geometric distortion and any of their combinations. The watermarks are embedded in two constituent planes (ex. the U and V planes) of a color picture and are detected by evaluating the correlation between the planes. It thus requires no searches for treating random distortion.

Maintaining picture quality of color picture watermarking based on human visual system (collaboration with the University of Electro-Communications)

 We have proposed a method that takes into account the human visual system for processing color information to better maintain picture quality that a previously reported watermarking method. The method determines the watermark strength in the uniform color space (L*u*v* space), where human-perceived degradation of picture quality can be measured in terms of Euclidian distance, and embeds and detects watermarks in the YUV space, where detection is more reliable than that in the original method.

Reversible acoustic information hiding for integrity verification (collaboration with the Tokyo University of Information Sciences)

 We have developed a reversible information hiding that can verify the integrity of acoustic data with probative importance from being illegally used. A hash function is used as a feature value to be embedded into original acoustic target data as a checksum of the data’s originality. We compute the target original signal with an Integer Discrete Cosine Transform (intDCT) that has low computational complexity. Embedding space in the DCT domain is reserved for feature values and extra payload data, enabled by amplitude expansion in high-frequency spectrum of cover data. Countermeasures against overflow/underflow have been taken with adaptive gain optimization.

Reference

  1. Y. Atomori, I. Echizen, and H. Yoshiura, “Picture Watermarks Surviving General Affine Transformation and Random Distortion,” International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, vol.6, no.3(B), pp.1289-1304 (March 2010)
  2. X. Huang, A. Nishimura, and I. Echizen, “A Reversible Acoustic Steganography for Integrity verification,” Proc. of the 9th International Workshop on Digital Watermarking (IWDW 2010), LNCS 6526, pp.305-316, Springer (October 2010)
  3. I. Echizen, Y. Atomori, S. Nakayama, and H. Yoshiura, “Use of Human Visual System to Improve Video Watermarking for Immunity to Rotation, Scale, Translation, and Random Distortion,” Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing (CSSP), vol.27, no.2, pp. 213-227 (April 2008)