Abstract: Digital watermarking (WM) is the process that embeds an additional, identifying message called a watermark into a host multimedia object, such as audio, image or video for authentication purpose. Recently, digital WM technique, an information hiding technique has been investigated as one of the key authentication methods to maintain authenticity and security of multimedia content. By adding a transparent watermark to the multimedia content, it can be possible to make any malicious alteration detected to verify the integrity and the ownership of the digital media. During the last several years various WM techniques for still image have been extensively invented for software implementations due to the low data rate of these signals. Although the software approach holds an advantage of flexibility, certain computational restrictions may arise when attempting to operate at video rate or in portable devices. The hardware-level design offers several distinct advantages over the software implementation in terms of lower power consumption, reduced area and reliability. Therefore, there is a strong motivation for a move toward the hardware-based implementation for digital video WM system. In order to give a help for future related research works, this paper presents an up to date overview of digital video WM techniques and discusses the important considerations involving in designing VLSI architecture for a novel WM system in many ways. First of all, it goes through a brief survey on WM theory, laying out common classification criterions, discussing the properties of video WM techniques including the specific requirements as well as the comparison to image WM schemes. Various applications of video WM in practice are discussed. Since each WM application has its own specific requirements, WM design must take the intended application into account. Furthermore, the features of video WM implementations in software and hardware and comparison on those two approaches are presented from several points of view: major advantages, drawbacks and differences through the description of several examples of previous works. In addition, a versatile development methodology for hardware WM implementation including the general scheme of a proposed digital video WM system and testing using the custom breadboard are described.

Keywords: Digital video, watermarking, WM, hardware implementation, security.

ACM Classification Keywords: B.0 Hardware

Link:

HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATIONS OF VIDEO WATERMARKING

Xin Li, Yonatan Shoshan, Alexander Fish, Graham Jullien, Orly Yadid-Pecht?

http://foibg.com/ijitk/ijitk-vol03/IJITK03-2-p01.pdf