(54) COLOR CORRECT DIGITAL 5,363,212 11/1994 Taniuchi et al. ........................ 358,452 WATERMARKING OF IMAGES 5,426,710 6/1995 Suzuki et al. ....... ... 382/135 5.434,649 7/1995 Hasuo et al. ............................ 355/2O1 (75) Inventors: Gordon W. Braudaway, Yorktown OTHER PUBLICATIONS Heights; Karen A. Magerlein, Ossining; Frederick C. Mintzer, Shrub J. Pickerell & A. Child, "Marketing Photography in the Oak, all of N.Y. Digital Environment”, 1994, Image Watermarking for Pho toshop. (73) Assignee: International Business Machines K. B. Benson, ed., "Television Engineering Handbook', Corporation, Armonk, N.Y. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York 1986. Primary Examiner-David C. Cain (21) Appl. No.: 381,807 Attorney, Agent, or Firm-Richard M. Ludwin

Visible image watermarking has become an important and widely used technique to identify ownership and protect copyrights to images. A. visible image watermark immediately identifies the owner of an image, and ii properly constructed, can deter subsequent unscrupulous use of the image.The insertion of a visible watermark should satisfy two conflicting conditions: the intensity of the watermark should be strong enough to he perceptible, get it should be Light enough to be unobtrusive and not mar the beauty oi the original image. Typically such an adjustment is made manually, and human intervention is required to set the intensity of the watermark at the right level. This is line for a few images, but is unsuitable for a large collection of images. Thus, it is desirable to have a technique to automatically adjust the intensity of the watermark based on some underlying property of each image. This will allow a large number of images to be automatically watermarked, thus increasing the throughput of the watermarking stage.In this paper we show that the measurement of image texture can be successfully used to automate the adjustment of watermark intensity. A Linear regression model is used to predict subjective assessments of correct watermark intensity based on image texture measurements.

In this paper we propose a new method for invisibly watermarking high-quality color and gray-scale images. This method is intended for use in image verification applications to determine whether the content of an image has been altered, due perhaps, to the act of a malicious party. It consists of both a watermarking process which stamps a watermark into a source image without visual degradation, and a watermark extraction process which extracts a watermark from a stamped image. The extracted watermark can be compared with the embedded watermark to determine whether the image has been altered. The processing used in the watermarking and watermark extraction processes will be presented in this paper. In addition, we shall describe some modifications that provide better security, and an adaptation of the scheme to watermark JPEG images. Experimental results are reported. Some advantages of this technique over other invisible watermarking techniques for verification will be discussed; these include a high degree of invisibility color preservation, ease of extraction, and a high degree of protection against the retention of a correct watermark after alteration by a malicious party. (C) 1998 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(98)00903-9].

In this paper, we address the requirements, techniques and applications of digital watermarking for high-quality images. We present several classes of digital watermarking techniques defined by their appearance and application domains, specify the requirements, and summarize the current research efforts in the Image Library Applications group of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center on digital watermarking of high-quality images. We hope that by addressing these issues, we can both provide a foundation for the next generation of digital watermarking techniques, and a vision for their future applications

The Vatican Library is an extraordinary repository of rare books and manuscripts. Among its 150,000 manuscripts are early copies of works by Aristotle, Dante, Euclid, Homer, and Virgil. Yet today access to the Library is limited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, only some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year. Through the Vatican Library Project, we are exploring the practicality of providing digital library services that extend access to portions of the Library's collections to scholars worldwide, as an early example of providing digital library services that extend and complement traditional library services. A core goal of the project is to provide access via the Internet to some of the Library's most valuable manuscripts, printed books, and other sources to a scholarly community around the world. A multinational, multidisciplinary team is addressing the technical challenges raised by that goal, including • Development of a multiserver system suitable for providing information to scholars worldwide. • Capture of images of the materials with faithful color and sufficient detail to support scholarly study. Protection of the on-line materials, especially images, from misappropriation. • Development of tools to enable scholars to locate desired materials. • Development of tools to enable scholars to scrutinize images of manuscripts. • In this paper, we provide an overview of the project, a description of the system being developed to satisfy its needs, and a discussion of how the technical challenges are being addressed.