Nasir Memon

Watermarking

Watermarking research has given rise to very powerful techniques. Formerly, these techniques were primarily aimed at multimedia applications where the models and constraints had similar characteristics. Today a new generation of applications is emerging that poses exciting possibilities for watermarking techniques. These new applications most commonly have different goals, requirements and constraints, which do not necessarily coincide with those of multimedia applications. As a consequence, the conventional design paradigm has to be revised. One aspect of this revision involves a shift from static cover-objects, such as images, audio, and video, to more dynamic ones, such as data streams. Another aspect requires paralleling the changes in the governing security considerations. The final aspect concerns the adoption of a new model of attack channel, which would tend to include fewer malicious elements, making a watermarking-based approached more viable. With this point of view, we pose three research proposals that address the preceding three areas. Our research takes a multiple-pronged approach that applies the ideas and principles of watermarking to physical-layer communication and network-security problems. In addition, we are analyzing the security aspects of many watermarking applications and improving the existing techniques and protocols with reference to the prevalent security paradigm.

Participants: Taha Sencar, Nasir Memon

Resources:

• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar and A. N. Akansu, Data Hiding Fundamentals and Applications, ELSEVIER ACADEMIC PRESS, 2004.
• H. T. Sencar, Q. Li and N. Memon, A New Approach to Countering Ambiguity Attacks, Submitted to ACM Multimedia Security Workshop 2007.
• H. T. Sencar and N. Memon, Combatting Ambiguity Attacks via Selective Detection of Embedded Watermarks, Submitted for Journal Publication.
• Q. Li, N. Memon, and H. T. Sencar, Security Issues in Watermarking Applications, Proc. of ACM Workshop on Multimedia Content Protection and Security
• H. T. Sencar and N. Memon, Watermarking and Ownership Problem: A Revisit, Proc. of ACM DRM, 2005.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu Improved Utilization of Embedding Distortion in Scalar Quantization Based Data Hiding Techniques, Signal Processing Journal.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu An Overview of Scalar Quantization Based Data Hiding Methods, Signal Processing Journal.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu An Analysis of Quantization Based Embedding/Detection Techniques, Proc. of IEEE ICASSP, 2004.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu A New Perspective for Embedding/Detection Methods with Distortion Compensation and Thresholding Type of Post-processing Techniques, Proc. of IEEE ICIP, 2003.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu Multiple Codebook Information Hiding Based on Minimum Distortion Criterion, Proc. of CISS, 2003.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu Improvements on Data Hiding for Lossy Compression, Proc. of IEEE ICASSP, 2002.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu A Robust Type-III Data Hiding Technique Against Cropping & Resizing Attacks, Proc. of IEEE ISCAS, 2002.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu Multiple Codebook Information Hiding , Proc. of CISS, 2002.
• H. T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar, and A. N. Akansu Efficient Codebook Structures for Practical Information Hiding Systems , Proc. of CISS, 2001.