Reversible Watermarking Techniques - Intelligent Multimedia Data Hiding - page 344

13

Reversible Watermarking Techniques

Shao-Wei Weng 1 , Yao Zhao 1 , and Jeng-Shyang Pan 2

1

Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiao Tong University, Beijing 100044,
P.R. China
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

2

National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Kaohsiung 807, Taiwan,
R.O.C.
[e-mail]
http://bit.kuas.edu.tw/ ∼ jspan/

Summary. In this chapter, several reversible watermarking algorithms are intro-
duced. The key idea of existing reversible watermarking techniques according to
two basic classifications is generalized in this chapter. The first classification is
based on Robust Spatial Additive Watermarks combined with modulo addition.
The second classification is partitioned into three subsets. The first subset based on
Lossless Compression Techniques contains lossless bit-plane compression methods in
the spatial domain and in the Integer Discrete Wavelet Transform (IDWT) domain,
the reversible RS data-embedding method, and the lossless G-LSB data-embedding
method, respectively. The second subset contains the algorithm based on histogram
shifting techniques. The third subset based on the value expansion techniques con-
tains Integer Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) based bit-shifting method. Finally,
the chapter introduces our own technique. The performance of related techniques is
compared and their respective advantage and disadvantage are also analyzed in this
chapter.

13.1 Introduction

Digital watermarking refers to the process of embedding some labels or sig-
natures into digital media without introducing perceptible artifacts. It plays
a vital role in the applications to copyright protection of digital media, au-
thentication, date integrity, fingerprinting, and data hiding. However, digital
watermarking usually introduces a slight but irreversible or permanent distor-
tion to the original image. Although the distortion is generally quite small, it
may not be acceptable for some applications, such as in the fields of the law
enforcement, medical and military systems. It is desired to restore the origi-
nal image from the watermarked image after the hidden data is retrieved due
to the highly-precise requirement. The data embedding techniques, capable of
reversing to the exact copy of the original image, are referred to as Reversible,