Robust digital watermarking using progressive error correction techniques

Abstract

With the recent rapid growth of communication networks, multimedia data are widespread to distribute, duplicate and modify by others in various ways, and extending to the copyright and piracy problem. To solve this problem, people look for high secure method to protect the publicly accessible data. Digital Watermarking is a technique for protecting copyright and counterfeit masterpiece forgery. In this project, a combination of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and progressive error correction approach had been implemented to achieve the robustness and the imperceptions. Since the compression will filter high frequency and people are more sensitive to low frequency, embedding a binary watermark by selectively middle frequency coefficients has been used. Most techniques are subjected to geometric and random noise effects; progressive error correction algorithm owns the ability of resisting burst noise and increases the robustness. In the experiments, the results show that the robustness of a watermark with Progressive Error Correction (PEC) is much better than the traditional one without PEC. Furthermore, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 has been implemented to achieve this project.