International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology

Vol. 11, October, 2009

Secure and Robust Digital Watermarking on Grey Level Images

G.RoslineNesaKumari1, B. VijayaKumar2, L.Sumalatha3, and Dr V.V.Krishna4

1
Research Scholar- Dr MGR University Chennai, T.N.India & Associate Professor,
Godavari Institute of Engineering and Technology, Rajahmundry, A.P.India
2
Professor & Head, Department of CSE, Lords Institute of Engineering &
Technology, Hyderabad, A.P. India
3
Associate Professor & Head Department of CSE, University College of Engineering,
JNTU Kakinada, A.P.India
4
Professor of CSE and Principal, Chaitanya Institute of Engineering and Technology,
Rajahmundry, A.P., India

[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],
[email protected]

Abstract

A good watermarking technique embeds information into a carrier image with virtually
imperceptible modification of the image. The present paper found a novel fact that by inserting
the watermark using Least Significant Bit (LSB), the grey value of the image pixel either
remains same or increases or decreases to one. The present paper is focused on this issue and
found that such ambiguity of grey level values by LSB method comes between successive even
and odd grey level values only. The proposed method inserts hidden message on m x m
windows, based on their grey level values and coordinate positions. The present approach
allows high robustness, embedding capacity and enhanced security. A detailed algorithm is
furnished along with the results of its application on some sample images.

Keywords: grey level value; watermark; even and odd; robustness

1. Introduction
The rapid growth of the Internet increased the access to multimedia data
tremendously [1]. The development of digital multimedia is demanding as an urgent
need for protect multimedia data in internet. Digital watermarking technique provides
copyright protection for digital data [2-4]. The digital watermarking technique is
proposed as a method to embed perceptible or imperceptible signal into multimedia data
for claiming the ownership. A digital watermark is a piece of information which is
embedded in the digital media and hidden in the digital content in such a way that it is
inseparable from its data. This piece of information known as watermark, a tag, or label
into multimedia object such that the watermark can be detected or extracted later to
make an assertion about the object. The object may be an image, audio, video, or text
[5]. Watermark enables many applications listed below. A. Copy Control - Watermark
may contain information required by the content owner that decides the policy of
copying the digital content [1, 6]. B. Digital signatures - Watermarks may be used to
identify the owner of the content [6]. C. Authentication - Watermark is used to provide
authenticity. D. Broadcast monitoring - Automatic identification of owners of data may
be required to be done and used in systems responsible for monitoring the broadcasts.

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E. Fingerprinting - Watermarks may be used to identify the content buyers. This may
help in tracing illegal copies. F. Secret communication - The technique of watermarking
is also used in transmitting secret information from source to destination by a hidden
way [7]. Each watermarking application has its own requirements that determine the
required attributes of the watermarking system and drive the choice of techniques used
for embedding the watermark [8]. This demand has been lately addressed by the
emergence of a variety of watermarking methods. Such methods target towards hiding
an imperceptible and undetectable signal in the original data, which conveys copyright
information about the owner or authorized user. Data hiding usually involves the use of
secret keys possessed only by owners or authorized users. In order to verify the
multimedia content owner and thus protect his copyrights, detection is performed to test
whether the material in question is watermarked with his own secret key [26 -28].
Recent research trend in watermarking technique is focusing more on image data [9, 10,
11, 12, 13]. But watermarking is not limited to only images; but there are also
watermarking techniques for audio [14, 15], video [16, 17, 18], and text [19, 20, 21, 22,
23, 24] data. Watermarking for black and white text data; e.g., electronic documents and
manuscripts, is so-called binary watermarks [25]. Watermarks and Watermarking
techniques can be divided into various categories. The watermarks can be applied either
in spatial domain or frequency domain. The spatial domain watermarking schemes have
less computational overhead compared with frequency domain schemes. The process
could be adjusted to the image components or feature vectors to achieve a higher level
of invisibility. In general, the watermark W(X) is integrated into the image components
C(x, y) by a factor that allows amplification of the watermarking values in order to
obtain the best results. LSB watermarking describes a straightforward and basic way to
integrate watermark information in digital documents. Considering a basic grey scale
image, the pixel and its values can be sliced up into significant and irrelevant levels.
Because the significant levels merely represent a digital noise pattern, it could be easily
used for digital watermarking. In changing the selected pixel values of the noise pattern
using a special or key-based algorithm, the watermarking information can be easily
integrated.
The present paper proposes a new architecture platform for secure grey level modification
watermarking system, which embeds binary data with in the spatial domain of the grey scale
images by modifying the grey level values. This paper is organized as follows: In section II
methodology is given. The results and discussions are given in section III and the final section
gives conclusions.

2. Methodology
Any image is represented by a two dimensional array of values f(xi,yj) where 0 ≤( i, j)≤ N.
The present paper divides the image into non overlapped window of a predefined size. Any
window of size m x m will be having m2 pixels. Each pixel in the window is represented by a
location (xi,yj) and a grey level value pi. By embedding a bit in LSB, the pi value will have the
following three cases. Case: 1 pi values may be same, if the corresponding LSB of pi and
embedded bit is same i.e., 1 or 1 and 0 or 0. Case: 2 pi values may be incremented by one, if
LSB of pi is zero and embedded bit value is one. Case: 3 pi values may be decremented by one
if LSB of pi is one and embedded bit value is zero.
If the pi is even, its LSB is zero there fore its value will be changing as represented in Case1
or Case 2. If the pi is odd, its LSB is one, therefore its value will be changing as represented in
Case1 or Case 3. Based on above three cases, the present method found that the ambiguity of

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pixel values will be arising at the time of reconstruction between successive even and odd
values. To overcome this present method treated the successive even and odd values of the
window as same, i.e., ni and ni+1, where ni is an even number, and the difference of ni+1 and ni
is always one. While embedding the watermark the order of selection of the hit pixels in the
window is based on the least co-ordinate position. The entire process of embedding the
information is given in the form of flowchart in figure: 1.

START A

Cover Image C(x,y) Zj= W T(Xj)%Y

Watermark Text W T(X1… Xk), for j=1 to k
A(Xj) is the payloaded watermark text

A(Xj) = append (WT (Xj),Zj)

for j=1 to k
Divide C(x,y) into
non overlapped
windows ‘W’ of size m x m
Insert A(Xj)
for j=1 to k
in the hit pixels
Sort the grey
STOP
Level values of
W

If
N ni- (ni +1) = -1
where ni mod 2=0

Y
Select the values
of successive
(ni, (ni +1))pairs

Identify all hit pixels

in Wi (x,y) with
coordinate position

Figure 1. Flow Chart for the Proposed Scheme.

The present method is explained for the grey level image of figure2. The Table1 gives the
sorted list of grey level values with the co-ordinate position of figure2. For the image of

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figure 2 the present method considers the pair of values (80,81), (78,79),(76,77), and (74,75)
as same in the ascending order. To over come the further ambiguity between the successive
even and odd values the hit pixel will be selected based on the least x co-ordinate position.
Based on this the first hit pixel will be selected from the coordinated position (0,3) for the
image of figure2 as shown in Table 1.

78 75 79 80 81
81 80 81 81 80
76 75 76 75 80
78 77 79 78 75
80 81 75 74 73
Figure 2. Grey Level values of the image 5X5.

Table 1. Sorted grey level values with the coordinate position of figure2.

Coordinate pi Coordinate pi
positions (xi,yj) positions (xi,yj)
xi yj xi yj
4 4 73 0 2 79
4 3 74 3 2 79
0 1 75 0 3 80
2 1 75 1 1 80
2 3 75 1 4 80
3 4 75 2 4 80
4 2 75 4 1 80
2 0 76 0 4 81
2 2 76 1 0 81
3 1 77 1 2 81
0 0 78 1 3 81
3 0 78 4 1 81
3 3 78

The present method considers the watermark text as “srinivasa ramanujan research forum
giet rajahmundry”. Each watermark character value is divided by mod Y, and the remainder is
appended to the watermark text character. Appending may be carried out in left side, right side
or at any position of the watermark text character. The present paper appends the remainder
values on the right side of the watermark text character.

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Vol. 11, October, 2009

Figure 3(a) Figure 3(b)

Figure 4(a) Figure 4(b)

Figure 5(a) Figure 5(b)

3. Results and Discussions
The proposed method is applied on more than 32 different images with different sizes.
However the present paper shows four of them of size 100X100.The figures 3(a),4(a),5(a),
6(a) indicates the original or cover image of fishing boat, lena, flight and peppers image
respectively. The figures 3(b),4(b),5(b),6(b) indicates the watermarked image with the text

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Vol. 11, October, 2009

“srinivasa ramanujan research forum giet rajahmundry” inserted on the cover image. The
results clearly indicate the imperceptibility, obtrusiveness, robustness and unambiguous nature
of the present method. The present paper converted each character of the watermarked text as
12 bit code by dividing each character value by mod9. The four bit remainder is appended to
make 8 bit text character, as 12 bit character.

Figure 6(a) Figure 6(b)

Figure 3(a), 4(a),5(a),6(a) : cover images

Figure 3(b),4(b),5(b),6(b) : watermarked images with watermark text as “srinivasa
ramanujan research forum giet rajahmundry”.

4. Conclusion
The proposed watermarking method is having high robustness, embedding capacity and
enhanced security because watermark text is inserted based on the grey level values and its
co-ordinate position. The present method identified and would overcome with a solution for
the ambiguity of grey level values, which arose between successive even and odd values after
inserting the watermark using LSB. Future work includes extending the method based on
descending order of pixel grey level values and appending more number of bits for each
character, which makes the method as more dynamic. And it will become more difficult to
break the watermark. The present method can also be applied on any window irrespective of
its size.

References

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Authors

G Rosline NesaKumari received her M.E., from Sathyabama

University Chennai in 2005. She is having nine years of teaching
experience. She is now with Godavari Institute of Engineering and
Technology Rajahmundry India as an Associate Professor. She is
pursuing her Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering at Dr MGR
University Chennai under the Guidance of Dr V VijayaKumar. Her
research interest includes Image processing, Digital Watermarking,
Steganography and Security. She is a life member of ISCA, IAENG.

B Vijaya Kumar completed his M S in CSE from DPI, Donetsk,

USSR in 1993. He worked as Software Engineer in Serveen Software
Systems pvt. Ltd. Secunderabad, India for four years (1993-1997).
After that he worked as Sr. Assistant Professor in JBIET, Hyderabad
for three years later joined in Royal Institute of Technology &
Science, Hyderabad as Associate Professor and worked there for four
years. Presently he is working as Professor & Head of CSE
Department in Lords Institute of Engineering & Technology, Hyderabad, India. He is
pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science under the guidance of Dr Vakulabharanam
Vijaya Kumar. He is a life member of CSI, ISTE, NESA and ISCA. He has published
more than 10 research publications in various National, Inter National conferences,
proceedings and Journals.

L. Sumalatha completed her B.Tech from Acahrya Nagarjuna

University and M.Tech CSE from JNT University Hyderabad. She is
working as Head Departement of CSE College of Engineering JNT
University Kakinada. She is having nine years of teaching
experience. She is pursuing her Ph.D from JNT University
Kakinada. Her research areas includes network security, digital
imaging and digital watermarking.

V Venkata Krishna received B.Tech. (ECE) degree from Sri

Venkateswara University. He completed his M. Tech. (Computer
Science) from JNT University. He received his Ph.D in Computer
Science from JNT University in 2004. He worked as Professor and
Head for ten years in Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology,
Hyderabad. Later he worked as a principal at VVCE, Hyderabad and
CIST Kakinada. Presently he is working as Principal for Chaitanya
Institute of Engineering and Technology, Rajahmundry. He is an advisory member for
many Engineering colleges. He has published 20 research articles. Presently he is
guiding 10 research scholars. He is a life member of ISTE and CSI.