Digital Watermarking:

A Technology Overview
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Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems play a critical role in describing, identifying, trading,
protecting, monitoring and tracking the Intellectual Property (IP) rights of digital multimedia con-
tent distributed on the Internet. Digital watermarking techniques can be used in DRM systems
for establishing ownership rights, tracking usage, ensuring authorized access, preventing ille-
gal replication and facilitating content authentication. This paper gives a brief introduction to
digital watermarking technology.

Wipro Technologies
Innovative Solutions, Quality Leadership
WHITE PAPER Digital Watermarking: A Technology Overview

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 3

WHAT IS DIGITAL WATERMARKING? ................................................................. 4

FEATURES OF DIGITAL WATERMARKING .......................................................... 5

APPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL WATERMARKING .................................................. 5

CLASSIFICATION OF DIGITAL WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES ........................ 6

DIGITAL WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES ........................................................... 7

CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 8

ABOUT WIPRO ..................................................................................................... 9

WIPRO AND DIGITAL WATERMARKING TECHNOLOGY .................................... 9

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WHITE PAPER Digital Watermarking: A Technology Overview

Introduction
In recent times, Internet is being increasingly used as the platform for distribution of digital
multimedia content. The inherent flexibility of Internet facilitates users to transact with one
another to create, distribute, store, peruse, subscribe, enhance, modify and trade digital
content in various forms like text documents, databases, e-books, still images, audio, video,
computer software and games.

The use of an open medium like Internet gives rise to concerns about protection and
enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights of the digital content involved in the transaction.
In addition, unauthorized replication and manipulation of digital content is relatively trivial and
can be done using inexpensive tools, unlike the traditional analog multimedia content. Digital
Rights Management (DRM) systems address the issues related to ownership rights of
digital content. DRM systems help in describing, identifying, trading, protecting, monitoring
and tracking the IP rights of digital content to prevent unauthorized usage, replication and
distribution of digital content.

Various organizations like Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are working towards standardization
of DRM systems. In addition, organizations like Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI,
www.sdmi.org), Open eBook Forum (OeBF, www.openebook.org), International DOI Foundation
(IDF, www.doi.org) and systems like Interoperability of Data in e-commerce Systems
(www.indecs.org), Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), Extensible Rights Markup
Language (XrML, www.xrml.org) and Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata
(PRISM, www.prismstandard.org) are being created to address DRM issues in different
domains like recorded music, e-publishing and e-commerce.

Though there has been considerable activity and interest in DRM, the issue of IP rights and
content protection is fraught with legal complications and controversies. Different parties like
content creators, music recording companies, movie production houses, book publishers,
open-source software development community, consumer electronics industry, software
companies, government organizations, legal fraternity and end-users have different views
and opinions on protection and management of IP rights making it a much debated subject
today. Hence the biggest challenges for wide spread implementation of DRM systems include
defining the scope and framework of DRM systems that is acceptable to all the parties
involved and addressing the legal, political, business and deployment issues.

DRM systems address different aspects of content management namely, content

identification, content storage, content representation, content distribution and IP rights
management. This white paper focuses on IP rights management in general and digital
watermarking techniques in particular. Encryption technologies are already being widely
used to prevent unauthorized access of digital content. However, encryption alone does not
address all the IP issues related to DRM. Encryption does not prevent an authorized user
from illegally replicating decrypted content. Digital watermarking is one of the key technologies
that can be used for establishing ownership rights, tracking usage, ensuring authorized
access, preventing illegal replication and facilitating content authentication.

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WHITE PAPER Digital Watermarking: A Technology Overview

What is Digital Watermarking?

Watermarking is not a new technique. It is descendent of a technique known as
steganography which has been in existence for at least a few hundred years. Steganography
is a technique for concealed communication. In contrast to cryptography where the content
of a communicated message is secret, in steganography the very existence of the message
that is communicated is a secret and its presence is known only by parties involved in the
communication. Steganography is technique where a secret message is hidden within
another unrelated message and then communicated to the other party. Some of the techniques
of steganography like use of invisible ink, word spacing patterns in printed documents,
coding messages in music compositions, etc., have been used by military intelligence
since the times of ancient Greek civilization.

Watermarking can be considered as a special technique of steganography where one

message is embedded in another and the two messages are related to each other in some
way. The most common examples of watermarking are the presence of specific patterns in
currency notes which are visible only when the note is held to light and logos in the background
of printed text documents. The watermarking techniques prevent forgery and unauthorized
replication of physical objects.

Digital watermarking is similar to watermarking physical objects except that the watermarking
technique is used for digital content instead of physical objects. In digital watermarking a
low-energy signal is imperceptibly embedded in another signal. The low-energy signal is
called watermark and it depicts some metadata, like security or rights information about the
main signal. The main signal in which the watermark is embedded is referred to as cover
signal since it covers the watermark. The cover signal is generally a still image, audio clip,
video sequence or a text document in digital format.

Noise Attacks
Watermark Watermark
Key Key
Cover
Signal Watermark Watermark
Watermark Communication
Embedder Channel Detector

Watermark
Signal

Figure 1: Digital Watermarking System

The digital watermarking system essentially consists of a watermark embedder and a

watermark detector (see Figure 1). The watermark embedder inserts a watermark onto the
cover signal and the watermark detector detects the presence of watermark signal. Note that
an entity called watermark key is used during the process of embedding and detecting
watermarks. The watermark key has a one-to-one correspondence with watermark signal
(i.e., a unique watermark key exists for every watermark signal). The watermark key is private
and known to only authorized parties and it ensures that only authorized parties can detect
the watermark. Further, note that the communication channel can be noisy and hostile (i.e.,
prone to security attacks) and hence the digital watermarking techniques should be resilient
to both noise and security attacks.

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Features of Digital Watermarking

As mentioned earlier, digital watermarking techniques are useful for embedding metadata
in multimedia content. There are alternate mechanisms like using the header of a digital file
to store meta-information. However, for inserting visible marks in images & video and for
adding information about audio at the beginning or end of the audio clip etc. the digital
watermarking technique is appealing, since it provides following main features and does
not require out-of-band data as in other mechanisms.

• Imperceptibility: The embedded watermarks are imperceptible both perceptually as

well as statistically and do not alter the aesthetics of the multimedia content that is
watermarked. The watermarks do not create visible artifacts in still images, alter the bit-
rate of video or introduce audible frequencies in audio signals.

• Robustness: Depending on the application, the digital watermarking technique can

support different levels of robustness against changes made to the watermarked content.
If digital watermarking is used for ownership identification, then the watermark has to be
robust against any modifications. The watermarks should not get degraded or destroyed
as a result of unintentional or malicious signal and geometric distortions like analog-to-
digital conversion, digital-to-analog conversion, cropping, resampling, rotation, dithering,
quantization, scaling and compression of the content. On the other hand, if digital
watermarking is used for content authentication, the watermarks should be fragile, i.e.,
the watermarks should get destroyed whenever the content is modified so that any
modification to content can be detected.

• Inseparability: After the digital content is embedded with watermark, separating the
content from the watermark to retrieve the original content is not possible.

• Security: The digital watermarking techniques prevent unauthorized users from detecting
and modifying the watermark embedded in the cover signal. Watermark keys ensure that
only authorized users are able to detect/modify the watermark.

Applications of Digital Watermarking

Digital watermarking techniques have wide ranging applications. Some of the applications
are enlisted below.

• Copyright Protection: Digital watermarks can be used to identify and protect copyright
ownership. Digital content can be embedded with watermarks depicting metadata
identifying the copyright owners.

• Copy Protection: Digital content can be watermarked to indicate that the content cannot
be illegally replicated. Devices capable of replication can then detect such watermarks
and prevent unauthorized replication of the content.

• Tracking: Digital watermarks can be used to track the usage of digital content. Each copy
of digital content can be uniquely watermarked with metadata specifying the authorized
users of the content. Such watermarks can be used to detect illegal replication of content
by identifying the users who replicated the content illegally. The watermarking technique
used for tracking is called as fingerprinting.

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WHITE PAPER Digital Watermarking: A Technology Overview

• Tamper Proofing: Digital watermarks, which are fragile in nature, can be used for tamper
proofing. Digital content can be embedded with fragile watermarks that get destroyed
whenever any sort of modification is made to the content. Such watermarks can be used
to authenticate the content.

• Broadcast Monitoring: Digital watermarks can be used to monitor broadcasted content

like television and broadcast radio signals. Advertising companies can use systems that
can detect the broadcast of advertisements for billing purposes by identifying the
watermarks broadcast along with the content.

• Concealed Communication: Since watermarking is a special technique of

steganography, it can be used for concealed communication also.

Classification of Digital Watermarking Techniques

Digital Watermarking techniques can be classified in a number of ways depending on different
parameters. Various types of watermarking techniques are enlisted below. Each of the different
types mentioned below have different applications.

• Robust & Fragile Watermarking: Robust watermarking is a technique in which

modification to the watermarked content will not affect the watermark. As opposed to this,
fragile watermarking is a technique in which watermark gets destroyed when
watermarked content is modified or tampered with.

• Visible & Transparent Watermarking: Visible watermarks are ones which are embedded
in visual content in such a way that they are visible when the content is viewed. Transparent
watermarks are imperceptible and they cannot be detected by just viewing the digital
content.

• Public & Private Watermarking: In public watermarking, users of the content are
authorized to detect the watermark while in private watermarking the users are not
authorized to detect the watermark.

• Asymmetric & Symmetric Watermarking: Asymmetric watermarking (also called

asymmetric key watermarking) is a technique where different keys are used for embedding
and detecting the watermark. In symmetric watermarking (or symmetric key watermarking)
the same keys are used for embedding and detecting watermarks.

• Steganographic & Non-Steganographic watermarking: Steganographic watermarking

is the technique where content users are unaware of the presence of a watermark. In
non-steganographic watermarking, the users are aware of the presence of a watermark.
Steganographic watermarking is used in fingerprinting applications while non-
steganographic watermarking techniques can be used to deter piracy.

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WHITE PAPER Digital Watermarking: A Technology Overview

Digital Watermarking Techniques

Digital watermarking techniques take advantage of limitation of human perception. The
digital watermarking techniques embed watermark in cover signals in such a way that the
watermark does not alter the human perception of cover signal and the watermark can be
detected only using signal processing techniques. Digital watermarking techniques can be
used successfully with digital content in various forms like still images, video clips, audio
tracks and text documents.

One of the simplest methods of inserting a digital watermark in a still image is called Least-
Significant-Bit (LSB) watermarking. In this technique the lower order bits of selected pixels in
the image are used to store watermarks. Techniques like flipping the lower order bits,
replacing the lower order bits of each pixel with higher order bits of a different image (for e.g.,
a company logo), superimposing a watermark image over an area of image to be
watermarked and adding some fixed intensity value are used to embed watermarks in
spatial domain. Watermarks can also be inserted in frequency domain by applying transforms
like Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and then altering the values of selected transform coefficients
to store the watermark in still images. In addition, color separation techniques where the
watermark appears only in one of the color bands, can be used for insertion of watermark in
still images.

Still image watermarking techniques can be extended and used with video signals, since
video can be considered as a sequence of still images. However, digital video is generally
stored and distributed in compressed format (e.g., MPEG-2, MPEG-4) in which the
compression algorithms take advantage of temporal redundancy in the video and hence still
image watermarking techniques cannot be effectively used in such cases. So techniques
that embed watermarks in raw video signal in such a way that the watermarks are unaffected
by compression of the raw video signal and techniques that can directly embed watermarks
in compressed video are considered effective and desirable. Further, one of the main
constraints faced by video watermarking techniques is that they should not alter the bit-rate
of the video. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) based mechanisms where the watermarks
are embedded in lowest frequency components in a controlled quantization process have
been proposed. Further, techniques which can embed watermarks in compressed bit streams
by transforming the watermark signal using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and directly
embedding it in compressed video bit stream have been proposed.

The main constraint in watermarking audio signal is that the watermark should be inaudible
to the listener. However this constraint poses a serious problem. Since digital audio is
generally compressed using audio compression algorithms that tend to remove or mask
inaudible frequencies, watermarks, which are inaudible, are also lost. Several techniques
like bit stream watermarking and PCM watermarking are used to watermark audio material.
In bit stream watermarking the watermark data is directly inserted into compressed audio
files. In contrast, PCM watermarking embeds watermark in uncompressed audio data by
hiding a broadband data signal below the audio signal’s masking threshold. Further,
techniques like insertion of low-amplitude echoes are used to embed watermarks in audio
material.

Techniques like word space coding, line space coding and character coding are used for
insertion of watermarks in text document. In word space coding, the spaces between words
are subtly and imperceptibly altered to embed watermark code. In line space coding the
space between the lines are altered and in character coding some of the characters are
imperceptibly modified (i.e., made larger, serifs enhanced, etc).

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Watermarking techniques that use spread spectrum communication principles are used for
insertion of robust watermarks in audio and video signals. These techniques embed the
watermark as a low-energy, pseudo randomly generated white-noise sequence which can
be detected using correlation. New classes of watermarking technique known as second
generation watermarking (2GW) systems which embed watermarks in perceptually
significant portions of the signal by analyzing the semantic content of the signal are being
increasingly proposed and used.

Conclusion
DRM systems and content management are important for protection of rights of digital
multimedia creations that are distributed on the Internet. Digital watermarking is an effective
technique for embedding rights information in digital multimedia data. Digital watermarking
is an emerging technology which is critical for IP rights management and it is expected to
have huge commercial potential when it gets widely deployed in consumer electronic devices.

Digital watermarking technology and its applications have huge potential in consumer
electronics industry. Digital watermark technology can be used in consumer electronic devices
like digital still camera, digital video camera, set-top box (STB), DVD players, MP3 players,
etc., for various applications like providing controlled access (pay-per-view broadcasts),
preventing illegal replication and watermark embedding (embedding ownership information
in images captured in digital still/video cameras). However, as mentioned earlier, currently
there are legal complications and widespread disagreement about the scope of IP rights
and its enforcement which may delay deployment of digital watermarking applications in
consumer devices. But it is expected that sooner or later the controversial legal issues will
be addressed to ensure protection of IP rights of digital content.

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About Wipro
Wipro provides research and development services to telecom and electronic product
companies and software solutions to global corporate enterprises. In the Indian market,
Wipro is a leader in providing IT solutions and services for the corporate segment offering
System Integration, Network Integration and IT Services. Wipro Limited is the first SEI CMM
Level 5 certified IT Services Company operating in the global market. Wipro also has profitable
presence in niche market segments of consumer products and lighting.

Wipro is involved in development of IP blocks in various technology domains. Some of the IP

blocks and solutions offered by Wipro are, Residential Gateway (or Home Gateway), Digital
Set-Top-Box (STB), Bluetooth Solution, Voice-over-IP Solution, IEEE 1394 Solution, Embedded
TCP/IP Stack, Multimedia and DSP Solutions.

Wipro and Digital Watermarking Technology

Wipro is actively involved in development of digital watermarking systems for multimedia
content protection. Wipro offers several multimedia IP blocks, namely, MPEG-4 video encoder/
decoder, MPEG-2 video decoder, MPEG-4 Fine Granular Scalability (FGS) decoder, MP3
audio decoder, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Advance Audio Coding (AAC) decoder and others.
Wipro is also involved in integration digital watermarking techniques with the above mentioned
multimedia IP block offerings to enhance their value.

For further information and more details about our services, email us at [email protected] or
visit us at http://www.wipro.com/dsp.

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Specifications subject to change without notice.

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