Human visual system features enabling watermarking

Abstract

Digital watermarking consists of hiding subliminal information into digital media content, also called host data. It can be the basis of many applications, including security and media asset management. In this paper, we focus on the imperceptibility requirement for image watermarking. We present the main features of the Human Visual System (HVS) to be translated into watermarking technology. This paper highlights the need for dedicated inputs from the human vision community. The human visual system (HVS) is very complex and able to deal with a huge amount of information. Roughly speaking, it is composed of a receiver with a pre-processing stage, the eye and the retina, a transmission channel, the optic nerve, and a processing engine, the visual cortex. Mainly because of our lack of knowledge about brain behavior, i.e. about the way a stimulus is processed through its huge neural network, the large effort to understand and model the HVS behavior has partly remained fruitless. The aim of this paper is not to provide a thorough description of the HVS. For complete HVS models and more specific details, the reader is referred to existing literature [7, 14,42,51]. Here, we only try to understand, in a synthetic way and from an engineering perspective, the HVS features on which the designer of a watermarking algorithm can rely, i.e. its sensitivity and masking capabilities.

Use of Human Visual System to Improve Video Watermarking for Immunity to Rotation, Scale, Translation, and Random Distortion

“…3.1 can be based not only on the values of the target picture portion but also on the relationships between the values of the target portion and the surrounding portions. The latter type of control has been well studied for watermarking using luminance information [5,6,16] but not for watermarking using color information, as in our original method. We therefore propose using heuristic knowledge, like that identified by Tajima and Ikeda in their study of color image quantization for limited color display [17].…”

Advances in Digital Video Content Protection

“…The watermark may be inserted into the visual portion of the video as well as the audible portion [105]. Many watermarks are video adaptive, which reduces watermark visibility [90], [106] and increases robustness against attacks [107]- [109].…”

An adaptive watermarking approach based on weighted quantum particle swarm optimization

“…Two quantization parameters are used: one quantization parameter is determined by exploiting the characteristics of human visual system (HVS) [32] and the other quantization parameter is optimized through WQPSO algorithm. These two quantization parameters that are combined to ensure the final adaptive quantization steps are optimal for all embedding blocks.…”