Design and implementation of real-time image watermarking

The digital watermarking is a multimedia technology for information hiding which provides the authentication and copyright protection. The digital images are easily exchanged through internet and threaten to some malicious attacks. Wavelet based frequency domain watermarking provides the robustness against different attacks. Bit plane slicing scheme of spatial domain watermarking provides lesser computational complexity suitable for real time implementation. We combine advantages of the both the domains for the proposed algorithm. We have developed algorithm for robust and invisible application where we used non blind detection scheme. This approach is also implemented on FPGA. Several software implementations of the watermarking algorithms are available, but very few attempts have been made for hardware implementations. Software based watermarking schemes are more prone to offline attacks due to the delay between image captured and embedding the watermark. Hardware based watermarking provides real time embedding process where watermark is embedded at the same time when image is captured. This is very much useful in applications like real-time broad casting, video authentication and secure camera system for courtroom evidence. The goal of hardware implementation is to achieve low-power, high-performance, real-time, reliable and secure watermarking systems using FPGA.