Pattern Recognition Letters 25 (2004) 16811689 www.elsevier.

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Blind image data hiding based on self reference

Yulin Wang *, Alan Pearmain
Department of Electronic Engineering, Queen Mary College, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK Received 22 February 2004; received in revised form 11 May 2004 Available online 7 August 2004

Abstract For most watermark applications, it is often desired to retrieve the embedded information without access to the host data, which is a so-called blind watermarking technique. Most of the available blind watermarking schemes either suer signicantly from host data interference or require expense of storage. Therefore, a simple and eective blind watermarking scheme is expected. In this paper, we present a kind of blind watermarking technique, which is based on relative modulation of the pixel value/DCT coecient value by referring to its estimated one. This technique entirely eliminates the eect of host data interference, thus having considerable advantage over previous counterpart watermarking schemes. Especially, our DCT AC-estimation-based technique reveals extraordinary robustness against numerical attacks, such as noise addition, ltering and JPEG compression. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Data hiding; Watermarking; Image processing; DCT

1. Introduction With the rapid spread of computer networks and further development of multimedia technologies, digital contents can now be accessed more easily, thereby calling for stronger protection of intellectual property. For this reason, researchers have started looking at techniques that allow for copy control of digital multimedia data and enable
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 79 3063 0355; fax: +44 20 7882 7997. E-mail addresses: yulin.wang@elec.qmul.ac.uk (Y. Wang), alan.pearmain@elec.qmul.ac.uk (A. Pearmain).

copyright enforcement. It was realized that common cryptographic methods are not sucient: cryptography only protects the work during transmission and distribution; no protection is provided after the work has been decrypted and all work must eventually be decrypted if consumers are to enjoy the photograph, music, or movie. Steganography is not applicable either. In steganography, the message itself is usually of value and must be protected through clever hiding techniques, here the media for hiding a message is not of value. Digital watermark is proposed as an approach to solve this problem. Visible watermarks are designed to be easily perceived by the viewer and

0167-8655/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2004.06.012

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clearly identify the owner, however, the watermark must not detract from the image content itself. In this paper, hereafter, we refer to an invisible watermark when talking about a digital watermark, which is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions. Digital watermarking is the communication of information through embedding it into multimedia data, without introducing perceptual changes and extracting it later. The data with an embedded watermark is denoted as container. The embedded information can be used in a number of important multimedia applications. Though the interest in digital watermarking was rst triggered by its potential use for copyright protection of multimedia data exchanged in digital form, watermarking has been used for a variety of other purposes. For example, watermarking was proposed as a means of tracing traitors (Fiat and Tassa, 2001). In this paper, our proposed watermarking technique places focus on images, but can easily be expanded to other host media. Watermarking systems can be characterized by a number of properties; the importance of each being dependent on the requirements of the specic application as well as the role in which the watermark plays. 1.1. Imperceptibility The watermark should not be visible under typical or specied viewing conditions, that is, human eyes can not distinguish the watermarked media from the original. This is one of the essential requirements for a watermark. The data embedding process should not introduce any perceptible artifacts into the host data. On the other hand, for high robustness, it is desirable that the watermark amplitude be as high as possible. Thus, the design of a watermarking method always involves a tradeo between imperceptibility and robustness. It would be optimal to embed a watermark just below the threshold of perception, and this threshold will vary for dierent images. 1.2. Robustness The use of image signals in digital form commonly involves many types of processing or at-

tacks, such as lossy compression, ltering, resizing, contrast enhancement, cropping, rotation and so on. Depending on the specic application, an embedded watermark may need to be fragile, semi-fragile or robust. Fragile watermarks are designed to be distorted or broken under the slightest changes to an image. Semi-fragile watermarks are designed to break under all changes that exceed a user-specied threshold. A threshold of zero would form a fragile watermark. For watermarking to be useful, a robust watermark needs to withstand or be detectable even after moderate to severe signal processing attacks (compression, rescaling, etc.) on an image. 1.3. Capacity Depending on the application, the watermarking algorithm should allow a predened number of bits to be hidden. General rules do not exist, however, the number of bits that can be hidden into data is not unlimited, but often fairly small. Watermarking of multiple bits is more useful than one-bit watermarks, especially in such applications as side-information delivery. However, the more information we embed in the specic media, the less robust the watermark. Increased robustness requires a strong embedding strength, which in turn increases the visual degradation of the image. 1.4. Blindness Watermark detection techniques, which recover the watermark without resorting to the comparison between the watermarked and non-watermarked signals, are sometimes called oblivious or blind detection; otherwise they are called informed detection. Since the availability of an original image cam not be warranted in real-world scenarios, blind watermarking techniques, are more useful. Prior to proposing our technique, we summarise the most commonly used image watermarking techniques and classify them into four types. One type of technique is correlation-based, almost all of which are derived directly or indirectly from Cox et al.s spread spectrum technique (1997), which so far achieves the best imperceptibility and security among all available techniques. Some

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of them spread watermark bit energy into midband frequency components in transform domain (George et al., 1999; Donescu and Nguyen, 2000), and some spread energy in pixel domain (Mobasseri, 2000; Rughooputh and Bangaleea, 2002), the watermark detection of all these are based on the correlation value between watermark patterns used in the embedding stage and the watermarked image. Matching lter and maximal likelihood estimation, commonly used in communication, can be adopted to improve the accuracy of watermark detection. Compared with hiding the energy on individual pixels, such as the LSB technique, this kind of technique is more robust with the sacrice of watermark capacity, if the original host image is provided for watermark detection. The spread spectrum based system oers relatively little robustness when the host signal is not known at the decoder, and blind detection of spread spectrum watermark suers signicantly from host data interference. It has been shown recently that blind watermarking is considered being more ecient for side information communication (Chen and Wornell, 1999a,b), thus improved blind watermark schemes are highly needed. This insight has lead to a new group of blind watermark schemes. A key paper in this eld is the work by Costa (1983). For the additive white Gaussian noise case, Costa showed theoretically that interference from the host data could be eliminated. However, the proof involves a huge, unstructured and random codebook, which is not feasible in practical systems. Eggers and Su (2001) proposed a sub-optimal scalar Costa scheme (SCS) to reduce complexity, but with large expense of storage as tradeo. Similar situations exist in (Chen and Wornell, 1999a,b; Chou et al., 2000). Thus it is still in need of a simple and practical blind watermark scheme which does not suer from host data interference. Another type is based on the absolute modulation of individual primary or secondary elements of an image, such as pixel and transform coecient. For example, the quantization index modulation technique (QIM) indirectly modulates the quantization values of DCT coecients by mapping them to dierent indexes in a specic quantization table. Commonly used transforms in

watermarking techniques include DFT transform, DCT transform (Bors and Pitas, 1996; Huang et al., 1999), DWT transform (Wang et al., 2000; Moulin and Ivanovic, 2002) and Hadamard transform (Ho et al., 2002). The modulation depth of individual elements to hide watermark bits is based on the xed value or regular formulae/rule. For this type of techniques, the host image is also an interference of the watermark. If the element is an individual pixel, the watermark bit will be very weak even against moderate numerical processing (Kutter, 1998; Johnson and Jajodia, 1998). Though some of these types of technique are robust, the retrieval of embedded information is informed (Kim et al., 1999; Fridrich, 1998). The third type is based on relative modulation of a pair of elements, such as blocks or areas. Among this kind of technique, the typical ones are IBM patchwork (Nender et al., 1996) and DEW (Langelaar and Lagendijk, 2001). All of them exploit DPCM-alike modulation which is widely used in communication to embed watermark bits. By using this kind of watermarking technique, the host image is not an interference to the extraction of the watermark. Generally, blind techniques are often less robust and also harder to implement than non-blind. Blind watermarking has been extensively explored in recent years (Zeng and Liu, 1997; Chen and Wornell, 1999a,b), and these do not require the original image, instead they require parameters that are used in the embedding procedure, such as (Swanson et al., 1997; Bender et al., 1996). By adjusting these parameters, users can embed weak or strong watermarks. This kind of technique can not properly extract the embedded watermark when the strength parameters are unknown at the detection stage. The necessity to estimate strength parameters used in the watermark embedding process is a crucial weakness. In this paper we will extend the third type to achieve more robustness and imperceptibility by selecting a patch and its estimated one as a pair to achieve blind watermarking. The patch we used in this paper is an individual element. As we know that in the third kind of techniques, a pair of patches should be carefully selected to match very well, otherwise the watermark may be either

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perceptible or not robust due to a very limited modulation depth. In our proposed technique, the dierence between the patch and its estimated value is small, so they match very well. Since they normally change their values uniformly by global numerical image processing, small modulation depths can obtain reasonable robustness and perfect imperceptibility. In this paper we present two kind of estimation-based watermarking techniques, one is based on the estimation of pixel luminance in spatial domain and another based on the estimation of block DCT AC coecients. For short, we call the rst our spatial technique and the second our DCT technique. The remaining sections are organized as follows: In Section 2, we present our spatial technique followed by our DCT technique. For the purpose of comparison, we briey introduce the DCT DC value estimation-based technique proposed by Choi and Aizawa (1999). In Section 3, we present experimental results with our spatial technique, our DCT technique and Chois technique. The paper closes with concluding remarks in Section 4.

2.1. A data hiding technique based on the estimation of luminance value in spatial domain For a nature image, the luminance value of one pixel normally has a relation with its neighbours. The closer the pixels, the higher the correlation among them is. In our experiment, we choose different area sizes of 3 3, 5 5, 7 7 and 9 9, to estimate the luminance value of its central pixel in the area, as shown in Fig. 1. Let the luminance value of the central pixel be Lreal, indicated as in the gure. Calculate the mean luminance value Lmean of all its adjacent pixels in the area with selected size as the estimated value of the central pixel. Embed an one-bit watermark with the following self-dened translation rule: If the embedded bit is 1, change the luminance value of the central pixel, if needed, to make sure that

Lreal P Lmean D1 : If the embedded bit is 0, change the luminance value of the central pixel, if needed, to make sure that

2. The proposed scheme According to the natural features of an image, there exists correlation between one area and its adjacent areas in primary and secondary characteristics. By using the correlation, we can estimate the primary and secondary characteristic value of one area with its adjacent areas. Using the real value and its estimated value as a pair, we can exploit a similar technique used in patchwork (Nender et al., 1996) to hide one watermark bit. The more accurate the estimation, the less artifacts result from watermark embedding. In the following subsections, we present two kinds of watermarking techniques based on dierent characteristic values; one is based on estimation of the luminance value of the central pixel with its adjacent pixels in one area in spatial domain, and another is based on the estimation of AC coecients in the central 8 8 block with the DC coecients of its adjacent nine blocks in the block DCT domain.

Fig. 1. Estimation of the central pixel with adjacent pixels in an area with dierent sizes: (a) 3 3, (b) 5 5, (c) 7 7 and (d) 7 7.

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Lreal < Lmean D2 : As experienced values, D1 and D2 are selected as 5 10% of Lreal. The watermark bit extraction is done by a comparison of the relative value between Lreal and Lmean. The decision threshold for watermark extraction is as high as D1 + D2. If Lreal P Lmean, then the extracted bit is 1, otherwise if Lreal < Lmean, the extracted bit is 0. The exact values of D1 and D2 are not required for watermark bit extraction. 2.2. Data hiding technique based on the estimation of DCT AC coecients Before we present our DCT technique, we briey introduce Choi and Aizawas technique (1999), which is shown in Fig. 2. If the host is a spatial RGB colour image, rst convert it into YUV component, divide Y component into 8 8 blocks and calculate block DCT transform. Select each nine 8 8 blocks as one group to estimate the DC component of the central block by using DC components in its adjacent 4 blocks. Replace the actual DC value of the central block with its estimated value by adding modication with +D or D according to whether the bit is an 1 or 0.
RGB To YUV Original Image Y U V

Though the group consists of 9 blocks, only 4 blocks are used to estimate the DC component in the central block, which are shown as grey in colour in Fig. 2. Since human eyes are sensitive to change of the DC component, and since the prediction model used in Chois technique is not accurate, it is hard to control the D value to maintain robustness as well as imperceptibility. According to my verication, visible horse footsteps distortion appears in the watermarked image. Though the author presented a method to adaptively adjust the D value, the method is complicated and impractical for the blind extraction of a watermark. As we know, most of the signal energy of the block DCT is compacted in the DC component and the remaining energy is distributed diminishingly in the AC components in zigzag scan order. For most images, the primary characteristics of the DCT coecients in one block have a high correlation with the adjacent blocks. Gonzales et al. (1990) described a technique which estimates a few low frequency AC coecients precisely. Moreover, only the DC values of a 3 3 neighbourhood of 8 8 blocks are needed to estimate the AC coefcients of the central block shown in Fig. 3. The estimation formulae for the rst ve unquantized DCT AC coecients are shown in Eq. (1).
AC0; 1 1:13884 DC4 DC6 =8; AC1; 0 1:13884 DC2 DC8 =8; AC0; 2 0:27881 DC4 DC6 2 DC5 =8; AC2; 0 0:27881 DC2 DC8 2 DC5 =8; AC1; 1 0:16213 DC1 DC9 DC3 C7 =8:

DCT

Y plane

Block 1 DC1 Block 4 DC4 Block 7

Block 2 DC2 Central Block DC5 Block 8 DC8

Block 3 DC3 Block 6 DC6 Block 9 DC9

Fig. 2. Estimation of the DC component in the central block using four DC components in the up, down, left and right block.

DC7

Fig. 3. The central block (grey colour) and its adjacent blocks.

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Select every nine 8 8 blocks as one group, in which 5 watermark bits can be embedded by modulating the above 5 AC components in Eq. (1) referring to its estimated values with the following translation rule. Set ACi P AC0i D to embed bit 1; Set ACi 6 AC0i D to embed bit 0: 2

In Eq. (2), ACi is the real value of one of the 5 AC components: AC(0,1), AC(1,0), AC(0,2), AC(2,0) and AC(1,1). AC0i is the estimated value of ACi by using Eq. (1). D is a reference threshold. From our experiment, D can be chosen as 515% of the original ACi value. The original image is not required for the watermark bit detection, only the comparison of the relative value between ACi and its estimated value AC0i is needed. If ACi > AC0i , then the extracted bit is 1, otherwise if ACi < AC0i , then the extracted bit is 0. Of course, if ACi AC0i , there is uncertainty about whether the watermark bit is a 1 or 0. Depending on the texture feature of the block, varying amounts of watermark bits can be hidden. The smoother the selected group area, the smaller the AC value of the central block and therefore the fewer the number of bits that can be hidden in the group. If we attempt to hide a bit in the AC coefcient with too small a value, artefacts will appear or the watermark bit will be very weak to attacks due to the small decision threshold. For most of the image, the lower frequency components (AC(0,1) and AC(1,0)) have higher energy than other AC components. For security reasons we only choose these two ACs to hide information if the watermark capacity is satised.

Fig. 4. Nine standard images used in our experiment.

respectively. The maximal watermark capacity for dierent techniques is listed in Table 1. Obviously, our spatial technique with size 3 3 has the highest capacity among these techniques. Let the original un-watermarked host image of M by N pixels be f(i, j) and the watermarked counterpart be F(i, j). Both f(i, j) and F(i, j) range between black (0) and white (255). Error metrics are only computed on the luminance signal. The

Table 1 Watermark capacity (bits) Image no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Our spatial technique 33 87,296 28,900 28,900 12,769 28,900 28,900 21,590 28,900 28,900 55 31,212 10,404 10,404 4624 10,404 10,404 7752 10,404 10,404 77 15,914 5329 5329 2304 5329 5329 3888 5329 5329 99 9605 3136 3136 1369 3136 3136 2352 3136 3136 Our DCT technique 6720 2205 2205 980 2205 2205 1575 2205 2205 Chois

3. Experimental results In our experiment, nine standard colour images (Water, Baboon, Teri, Teapot, Man, Peppers, Pool, Lena and Fruitnumbered in sequence), as shown in Fig. 4, are used as host images. Watermarks are embedded in these images. We watermark each host image using Chois technique, our spatial technique and our DCT technique,

1344 441 441 196 441 441 315 441 441

Y. Wang, A. Pearmain / Pattern Recognition Letters 25 (2004) 16811689 Table 2 Imperceptibility using PSNR (dB) Image no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Our spatial technique 33 37.54 33.37 42.92 39.91 39.42 44.06 47.37 43.04 41.87 55 39.64 36.32 44.53 40.87 40.92 45.17 47.44 43.56 42.33 77 41.44 38.71 47.35 42.24 42.39 46.87 48.93 45.01 43.91 99 42.62 40.78 48.90 43.27 43.78 48.00 50.52 45.95 45.53 Our DCT technique 38.05 39.01 43.37 36.30 37.92 41.05 44.59 39.21 40.28 Chois Table 3 Extraction error rate (%) due to Gaussian noise addition Image no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Our spatial technique 33 12.42 11.41 9.03 8.83 7.56 6.67 8.43 10.34 11.43 55 11.42 10.43 10.11 8.56 8.23 8.32 7.02 10.64 11.54 77 13.24 13.52 9.04 10.34 9.32 8.34 8.43 9.03 12.53 99 14.64 15.64 10.45 9.77 10.31 9.03 9.02 11.36 14.22 Our DCT technique 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

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Chois

36.10 37.27 39.48 32.98 34.14 35.07 40.45 35.40 36.70

2.33 3.21 3.02 2.45 1.68 1.45 3.12 4.23 2.04

mean squared error (MSE) between f(i, j) and F(i, j) is as follows: P f i; j F i; j2 MSE : N2 The summation is over all pixels. The root mean squared error (RMSE) is the square root of MSE. PSNR in decibels (dB) is computed by using   255 PSNR 20log10 : RMSE In order to compare watermark imperceptibility among dierent techniques, we calculate the PSNR by using the original image and the watermarked image and list the results in Table 2. The results indicate that Chois technique generally has the smallest PSNR value among these techniques. This is because the DC component contains most of the blocks energy. A small estimation error of the DC component equals a great energy error, which corresponds to a low PSNR value. We measure the robustness against typical numerical attacks, Gaussian noise addition, JPEG compression and image sharpening, all of which are simulated with the Paint Shop Pro 7.0 software package. The error rates of watermark extraction are listed in Tables 35 respectively. From the results, we can see that the weakest is our spatial technique, and the most robust is our DCT technique. Finally, in order to reveal the extreme robustness of our DCT technique, we performed an extra test. 2730 bits were embedded in the host image (Watch-1024 768 pixels) imperceptibly only on

Table 4 Extraction error rate (%) due to JPEG compression (Quality Factor = 80) Image no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Our spatial technique 33 4.56 5.21 6.23 5.26 4.05 5.03 7.03 7.56 6.84 55 5.34 4.21 6.21 7.08 5.92 6.03 6.34 8.11 7.24 77 6.22 5.44 5.21 6.29 5.90 5.34 8.22 7.96 8.13 99 5.91 6.22 7.12 5.14 7.02 6.21 8.17 6.29 8.89 Our DCT technique 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Chois

1.02 0.98 0.33 1.34 0.67 0.44 1.33 0.78 0.55

Table 5 Watermark bit extraction error rate (%) due to sharpen Image no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Our spatial technique 33 10.42 11.45 10.78 11.24 9.88 13.52 14.02 12.78 13.35 55 11.45 10.25 11.32 10.93 10.55 14.23 13.92 12.84 13.82 77 12.01 13.67 12.87 11.54 13.55 14.76 13.57 13.23 14.56 99 11.98 13.97 13.27 12.34 15.67 15.78 14.34 15.31 16.45 Our DCT technique 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Chois

1.03 2.01 1.09 0.94 1.43 0.89 0.56 1.21 0.94

AC(0,1) and AC(1,0) in each central block of every group, the results are shown in Fig. 5. Fig. 5(a) and (b) are the original image and the watermarked image respectively. Using Paint Shop Pro. 7 to apply more typical image processing procedures (listed below) to the watermarked

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2. JPEG compression with compress factor = 99, standard encoding (checked). 3. A pair of downsizing & upsizing manipulations with the following parameters: Percentage of originalWidth: 25%, Height: 25%. Resize type: Bi-cubic resample. 4. Histogram equalization. 5. Sharpen. 6. Median Filter with lter aperture = 19. After each of these processing steps, we can errorfree extract all the embedded watermarking bits.

4. Conclusion In this paper, we present a kind of estimationbased blind image watermarking technique. Though it can be considered as an extension of the IBM patchwork technique, it has a great advantage over the latter in that the watermark modulation depth can be selected less under the same imperceptibility requirement. Unlike the IBM patchwork technique, our technique does not need to carefully select suitable pairs of patchworks. This makes blind watermark extraction easier to implement. We present two kinds of elements as watermark bit containers: individual pixel and individual DCT AC coecient. For the purpose of comparison, we also briey introduce Chois technique, which uses the DCT DC coecient as watermark bit container. Since human eyes are sensitive to the DC component, it is hard to set the modulation depth using Chois technique. Though human eyes are less sensitive to the change of individual pixels, individual pixel values are too weak for most of the numerical processing. Since global numerical attacks will modify the AC coecient and its estimated one equally, and the watermark bit extraction of our DCT technique is based on the relative value between both, the eect of attacks on the watermark is eliminated. This makes the watermark reasonably robust. Among these three techniques, our DCT technique achieves the optimal trade-o among imperceptibility, capacity and robustness. Finally, it is worthwhile to mention that in our DCT technique, the AC

Fig. 5. Original, watermarked and processed images: (a) original image; (b) watermarked image; (c) noise added to image (b); (d) JPEG compression of image (b) (compression factor = 99%); (e)image (b) downsized and upsized by a factor of 4; (f) image (b) histogram equalized; (g) image (b) sharpened and (h) image (b) median ltered.

image, we get the resultant images shown in Fig. 5(c)(h). 1. Adding salt and pepper with the following parameters: speck size = 7, sensitivity to specks = 8. Aggressive action (checked), include all lower speck sizes (checked).

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coecient in the central 8 8 block is estimated accurately only with the DC components in the nine 8 8 blocks. Due to its simplicity, this technique can be directly applied to watermark I frames of block DCT-based compressed video, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and H.262.

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