The latest watermarking (wavelet-based) scheme creates another new century.

A game developer have responsibilities to protect the copyright of the media or even the games, it connected networks allow cross-reference between databases. Whenever we generate the images, audio or video any kinds of network media, we have to make sure the author is being protected. How? By showing the authentic authors while downloading publicly, or at least hiding the author details behind the media. A video shown up on YouTube had discussed about the importance of protecting network media intellectual property, and investigated the limitation of copyright protection in related. The industry is investing to deliver audio, image and video data in electronic form to customers, which lead them by converting the content from analogue to digital form.

Regarding to the existence of the digital intellectual property, the digital data can be easily transmitted over networks, for example internet, which might improve the quality of digital signals and copies can be easily made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRfeMJqhmus

Technology and service developments over 2008 were consistent with the established trend of network and service convergence (Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2015), where shows a higher data rates trends over the media networks. However, the case of reproducing digital data in the exact original form is more likely to encourage copyright violation or data misappropriation.

According to Seaman in the article, we learnt the importance of database, it combines with the human activity process and how it constructs with audio, digital and video. Writing code is one of the ways to protect the media, including its authentication. I would like to focus on the concept of digital watermarking as is kinds of coding, aim to protect the copyright of the media, various watermarking schemes have been suggested for multimedia processing manipulations such as media compression and image enhancement. Moreover, the future development of networked multimedia systems, in particular an open networks like the Internet, is conditioned by the development of efficient methods to protect data owners against unauthorized copying and redistribution of the materials on the network. Also, watermarking is designed to permanently reside in the host data, does not restricted by the data encryption. For instance, if the ownership of a media had changed, the information can be extracted to completely characterize the owner if adding a watermark on.

So, here is a critical question. How can we build an effective watermarking algorithm?

However, it is desired that watermarks survive image-processing such as rotation, scaling, image compression and enhancement, those are the advantages that using watermarks in distributed media. Depending on the desire of the user, the watermark can be either visible or invisible (Holliman & Memon, 1997). The scheme can detect any modification made to the image and indicate the specific locations that have been modified. If the correct key is specified in the watermark extraction procedure, then an output image is returned showing a proper watermark. By indicating the image is authentic and has not been changed since the insertion of the watermark, surely any modification would be reflected in a corresponding error in the watermark. Liu and Wu made an experiment in order to verify if the key is incorrect, or if the image was not watermarked, or if the watermarked image is cropped, the watermark extraction algorithm will return an image that resembles random noise (Liu & Wu, 2008). Since it requires a user key during both the insertion and the extraction procedures, it is not possible for an unauthorized user to insert a new watermark or alter the existing watermark as to build an effective watermarking algorithm.

There is another question afterwards, previous discussion are based on the general protection of distributed media, is that mean there is no original “true” image can be used, as it has not been verified?

It is well known that multimedia authentication distinguishes itself from other data security issues, because its unique content property can be defined in several different levels. Mintzer, Braudaway and Yeung (1997) studied about the digital media, and clarified the multimedia authentication have developed from signal syntax levels to semantic levels. Referring to the picture below, Dr. Gitt talked about the various levels of the information communication, the semantics levels shows how the ideas communicated and understood among the sender and recipient. The syntax level referred the role of coding, how is employed and understood while the transmission of information. By adding or coding the authentication to the distributed media, which let other users know who is the “real” author while using the “real” image.

Furthermore, I was thinking about whether receiving less attention by applying the watermarking methods to those media data, such as lower the pixels of the distributed media, which may introduce the irregularities. Just take a simple example, if I am trying to add my names as watermarks on a picture by using phone apps (eg. Line Camera), it’s always lower the resolution of the image. Or even editing the video clips such as modified with animations or insert with audio media, it’s always create noise-like signals or run down the whole file, which fail to enhance the distributed media while protecting the databases.

Reddy & Chatterji (2005) discussed the creation of new wavelet based logo-watermarking scheme, which is presented for the copyright protection of digital image. It is a more user-friendly system, reliable for extracting the watermark from distorted images. They briefly explained two broad categories of watermarking techniques, such as spatial domain methods and transform domain methods. The technique is generated by the combinations of statistics and calculations, but basically is about adding the watermarks on the image and distributed it irregularly, and then the attacker may not read or modify it easily and hence to protect the image. Moreover, another advantage of the new watermarking scheme is that security can be improved by using randomly generated filter as a major part of key, to improve the private control over the watermark (Wang et al., 2002). I think this method can be helpful for some “geometric attacks” such as cropping and rotation, the attackers may not easily change the authentication of the images, as the “original author” is “hiding” behind the filter of the images.

On the other hand, I think it may sensitively influence the actual filter of the image, maybe sharpening or blurring the images even its not easily recognise. But by converting the greyscale logos into bit planes, these methods are not exploiting the perceptual characteristics of the logos and the host data in embedding the watermark. As pointed out by Kundur and Hatzinakos (2004) use of greyscale logo as watermark facilitates the embedding of arbitrary commercial logos and increases the quality of an overall number of possible logos identifiable by human observers. And this become the most common watermarking nowadays, just like when we upload images on eBay, Yahoo! Auction or even Gumtree, the internal system will add a logo which shows our ID on the images in greyscale, and its obviously meet the characteristics of “logo” and match the criteria of “watermarking” at the same time.

In conclusion, we have discussed from the general protection of the distributed media, and how the basic watermarking works, and reveal how to multimedia authentication communicates. It helps with the authentication issue, but I believe that may lower the quality of images, users may not able to receive the fully completed media. By applying the new watermarking scheme, authors are able to create a filter to “hind” their authentications, to minimizing the pixilation. Or using greyscale watermarking which is most common and simply way to match the principal of watermarking and also to protect the authentication. I believe the new watermarking scheme is best developed for reliable extraction of watermark from distorted images and stabilized the surrounding pixels.

Reference

A. Reddy, B.N. Chatterji, Pattern Recognition Letters, Elsevier B.V. ,Vol 26, Issue 7, 15 May 2005, Pages 1019–1027, doi:10.1016

Dr. Werner Gitt, The Five Levels of the Information Concept, March 19, 2009, https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/information-theory/the-five-levels-of-the-information-concept/

Mintzer, G. W. Braudaway, M. M. Yeung: Effective and Ineffective Digital Watermarks”, ICIP, 1997

Kundur, D., Hatzinakos, D., 2004. Towards Robust logo watermarking using multiresolution image fusion. IEEE Trans. Multimedia 6 (February), 185–197.

Holliman and N. Memon,  “Counterfeiting attacks on oblivious block-wise independent invisible watermarking schemes”, IEEE Trans. Image Processing,  vol. 6,  pp.432 -441 1997

Wu and B. Liu,  “Watermarking for image authentication”, Proc. ICIP,  2008

Social Media and Intellectual Property Security Training for Employees, viewed on 12/2/2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRfeMJqhmus

Trends in Communications and Media technology, applications and Use, Australian Communications and Media Authroity, released as at Feb, 2015. www.acma.gov.au/…/trends_comms_media_technology_applications_and_use

Wang, Y., Doherty, J.F., Van Dyck, R.E., 2002. A waveletbased watermarking algorithm for ownership verification of digital images. IEEE Trans. Image Process. vol. 11 (February), 77–88.

What is watermarking? And how to copyright images, viewed on 18/2/2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vINyw4JIodw