Hybrid additive multi-watermarking and decoding

Jinwei Wang, Shiguo Lian, Jin Wang

Abstract: Hybrid multi-watermarking uses different embedding rules to embed one or multiple watermarks into the same region of the cover imperceptibly and alternatively. It is considered as a potential way to implement the copyright protection of the cover and the trace of illegal distribution in multi-party content distribution. However, there are some open issues in creating a good hybrid multi-watermarking scheme, including the combination among multiple embedding rules and the combination among multiple watermarks. In this paper, we establish two novel hybrid multi-bit additive multi-watermarking models, and a novel hybrid multi-watermarking scheme based on the models, which embeds the multiple watermarks into DWT coefficients controlled by a secret key. Nextly, the hybrid multi-watermarking decoders, i.e., optimum and locally optimum, are deduced based on the minimum Bayesian risk criterion and the generalized Gaussian distribution. To evaluate the schemes’ performance, the average bit error rate is used to exactly analyze the performance of the optimum hybrid multi-watermarking decoders. Furthermore, the security of the proposed hybrid scheme is compared with that of the existing schemes. Finally, the robustness of the proposed hybrid scheme and the validity of the theoretical analysis is proved by the experimental results.