Protecting ownership rights of a lossless image coder through hierarchical watermarking

Current market forces make it necessary for designers to protect their work against illicit use. Digital watermarks can be used to sign a design and thus establish ownership. We present a hierarchical set of techniques for intellectual property protection of a linear predictive image coder. Watermarking techniques employed include switching entries in the Huffman coding table, applying zero cost hardware transformations, embedding a signature in the scheduling of shared hardware resources, and applying a watermark to the physical layout. Using these methods, it is possible to watermark complete ASIC or FPGA designs with little overhead in performance or achieved compression rates.