VLSI Implementation of Image Watermarking Algorithms

Abstract

Over the years, with the advent of network technologies, the usage of digital contents newlinehas increased enormously in a plethora of multimedia applications. The stupendous newlineusage and flexible access of multimedia content have led to effortless modification, newlineunauthorized access and duplication of the original data with the help of available newlinesoftware-packages and hacking-algorithms. Therefore, effective protection newlineprotocols/procedures are needed in all the digital transactions to protect the ingenuity newlineand ownership rights of the data. Digital image watermarking is one of the effective newlinemeasures to preserve the originality and authorship rights with greater security. In the newlinewatermarking processes, a visible/invisible secret signature (watermark) is embedded newlineinto the host multimedia content either in the spatial domain or frequency/transform newlinedomain. It is preferred for a watermarking scheme to meet the following requirements: newlineFirst, the watermark should be embedded in such a way that it is unnoticeable to newlinehuman vision (high imperceptibility) with a minimum or no degradation in the host newlinecontent. Second, the watermarking scheme must have the capabilities to extract the newlineoriginal watermark accurately from the manipulated image (good robustness). Third, newlineonly the authenticated user should be able to extract the invisible signature from the newlinewatermarked content (increased security) and finally, it has to embed more amount of newlineinformation into the host (high embedding capacity) content. Also, it would be newlinebeneficial for the users if the algorithm can support multiple watermarking on a single newlinehost image. However, most of the reported watermarking techniques fail to address all newlinethe aforementioned requirements at the same time.Additionally these reported newlinewatermarking algorithms primarily focuses on software implementation, which are newlinemore prone to hacking using available software tools and packages, that can be easily newlineavoided by using a dedicated hardware as a watermarking co-processor. However, only newlinea few researchers have attempted to