Digital Image Manipulation and Watermarking

During the final year of university, student would be presented with the project prospect to excel in both technical and non technical skills that will make the student more skilled and talented engineer in Digital Media Engineering sector. 

History

Due to development in technology and with invention of Internet, it has become increasingly easy and convenient for people to communicate and share resources. Therefore it also makes the system more vulnerable as technology available allows users to share copyrighted property without owner’s permission.

Proposal

The proposed project will tackle this issue by using the technique of ‘Digital Image Manipulation and Watermarking’. This technique will be used to address digital rights management, protect intellectual property of the user. This will help the property owner will be encoding a digital watermark (signature) into their work and prove the ownership when required.

Method

This project will look into inserting watermark into an image file, which will be used as authentication. In case of an attack to the image and then should be able to restore the attacked part of the image.

A semi-fragile watermarking method for authentication and restoration using DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and FHT (Fast Hadamard Transform) will be used to identify if the images have been tampered, and if they are then our algorithm will locate the attacked areas and restore them. In the end we will compare the two transform methods used and evaluate them to distinguish which one is superior.

Implementation
I will be using x32 bit Windows XP for operating system. The proposed software will be written in Matlab.

Block diagram of basic watermarking system.