METHODOLOGY FOR ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF METHODS FOR EMBEDDING DIGITAL WATERMARKS

In recent years, we have seen a significant increase in traffic moving across various networks and channels. The development of technology and global network leads to an increase in the amount of multimedia traffic. To authenticate and avoid abuse, data should be protected with watermarks. This paper discusses various robust and invisible watermarking methods in the spatial domain and the transform domain. The basic concepts of digital watermarks, important characteristics and areas of application of watermarks are considered in detail. The paper also presents the most important criteria for assessing the digital watermark effectiveness. Based on the analysis of the current state of the digital watermarking methods, robustness, imperceptibility, security and payload have been determined as the main factors in most scientific works. Moreover, researchers use different methods to improve / balance these factors to create an effective watermarking system. Our research identified the main factors and new techniques used in modern research. And the assessment of watermark method effectiveness was proposed.

Fast Fallback Watermark Detection Using Perceptual Hashes

Forensic watermarking is often used to enable the tracing of digital pirates that leak copyright-protected videos. However, existing watermarking methods have a limited robustness and may be vulnerable to targeted attacks. Our previous work proposed a fallback detection method that uses secondary watermarks rather than the primary watermarks embedded by existing methods. However, the previously proposed fallback method is slow and requires access to all watermarked videos. This paper proposes to make the fallback watermark detection method faster using perceptual hashes instead of uncompressed secondary watermark signals. These perceptual hashes can be calculated prior to detection, such that the actual detection process is sped up with a factor of approximately 26,000 to 92,000. In this way, the proposed method tackles the main criticism about practical usability of the slow fallback method. The fast detection comes at the cost of a modest decrease in robustness, although the fast fallback detection method can still outperform the existing primary watermark method. In conclusion, the proposed method enables fast and more robust detection of watermarks that were embedded by existing watermarking methods.

Secure protection of video recorder video in smart car

Many automobile drivers have come to believe that installation of video recording equipment in a car is essential to providing evidence in case of a car accident and to facilitate reporting to police. Thus, it is important to develop an in-vehicle video recorder with high resolution to document accidents. To provide such video quality, the H.264 video format, which offers high compression and good quality, has been used for an in-vehicle video recorder. However, due to problems with fabricated evidence of digital records, we propose a new watermark method to authenticate in-vehicle video. This watermarking scheme authenticates and protects in-vehicle video. The proposed scheme manipulates the quantization table of the I-frames in car surveillance videos and embeds watermarks in the I-frames. Experimental verification was done to confirm the authentication and tamper detection of the proposed watermark image method for in-vehicle video.