Psychovisual approach to digital picture watermarking

Delaigle, JF De Vleeschouwer, Christophe [UCL] Macq, Benoît [UCL]

In this paper, we wish to present a process enabling us to mark digital pictures with invisible and undetectable secret information. This so-called watermarking process is intended to be the basis of a complete copyright protection system. It consists of constructing a band-limited image from binary sequences with good correlation properties and in modulating some randomly selected carriers. The security relies on the secrecy of these carrier frequencies, which are deduced from a unique secret key. Then the amplitude of the modulated images is modified according to a masking criterion based on a model of the Human Visual System. The adding of the modulated images to the original is supposed to be invisible. The resulting image fully identifies the copyright owner since he is the only one able to detect and prove the presence of the embedded watermark thanks to his secret key. This paper also contains an analysis of the robustness of the watermark against compression and image processing. (C) 1998 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(98)01603-1].