Design and development of secured image watermarking for embedded system applications

Digital Image Processing is an ever expanding and dynamic area with applications reaching out into our everyday life such as digital gadgets, medicine, space exploration, internet technologies, surveillance, and many more areas. Applications such as these engross different processes like image/data compression, watermarking, enhancement, filtering, morphing, and resizing to name a few. The work presented here encompasses image watermarking through the use of numerical techniques along with their computational performance analysis, finding applications in embedded systems. The past decade has seen an explosion in the use and distribution of digital multimedia data. To provide protection for digital data, two complementary techniques have been developed namely encryption and watermarking. Encryption can be used to protect digital data during the transmission process from the sender to the receiver. Watermarking is a technique of embedding hidden information in multimedia data imperceptibly, such as image, video, audio and text data. Generally, an original image is transformed and coded watermark image data is embedded in frequency domain watermarking models. The proposed work explores the computational analysis of variable scaling factor (α) based invisible image watermarking process using the combination of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) compression and decompression algorithms. The performance analysis of such an invisible image watermarking system is measured using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), with respect to be embedded and extracted images correspondingly. The algorithms thus developed may find applications in copyright identification, finger printing, transaction tracking, content authentication, device control to name a few. To begin with the combinations of the three methods described are used to watermark the image. The best one among these combinations is implemented on to the hardware platform such as FPGA or DSP processors.

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Recommended citation: V. C. Angadi, P. K. Kulkarni and P. S. Somasagar (2012), "Design and development of secured image watermarking for embedded system applications", BEng Dissertation, VTU, India.