Copyright protection for digital multimedia has become a research hotspot in recent years. As an efficient solution, the digital watermarking scheme has emerged at the right moment. In this article, a highly robust and hybrid watermarking method is proposed. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) presented in recent years as well as the singular value decomposition (SVD) are adopted in this method to insert and recover the watermark. To enhance the watermark imperceptibility, the direct current (DC) coefficients after block-based APDCBT in high frequency sub-bands (LH and HL) are modified by using the watermark. Compared with the conventional SVD-based watermarking method and another watermarking technique, the watermarked images obtained by the proposed method have higher image quality. In addition, the proposed method achieves high robustness in resisting various image processing attacks.

With the maturity of image editing software, image content has been forged frequently, posing potential threats to many critical fields. To detect forgery images effectively, this paper proposes an image copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) method based on speeded-up robust feature (SURF) and polar complex exponential transform (PCET). Firstly, image is divided into non-overlapping irregular image blocks by superpixel segmentation. Then, these image blocks are separated into two categories: smooth regions and texture regions. Secondly, after finding the keypoints by SURF, the PCET coefficients are extracted and utilized for searching similar features by feature matching algorithm. Thirdly, a strategy is used to eliminate false matched points and find the regions with dense matched points. It combines the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm and a filtering scheme. Finally, mathematical morphology and an iterative strategy are adopted to refine the tampered regions. Compared with other CMFD methods, the proposed method can detect the forgery which occurs in high-brightness smooth regions or forgery images involving similar but genuine regions. Experimental results also indicate the proposed method can resist different distortions by various attacks, including rotation, scaling, blurring, joint photographic expert group (JPEG) compression, and noise addition.

With the development and popularization of the Internet and the rise of various live broadcast platforms, digital videos have penetrated into all aspects of people’s life. At the same time, all kinds of pirated videos are also flooding the Internet, which seriously infringe the rights and interests of video copyright owners and hinder the healthy development of the video industry. Therefore, robust video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection have emerged as these times require. In this paper, we review robust video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection based on original videos and compressed videos. Basic models and properties of video watermarking algorithms are described, and the evaluation indexes corresponding to each property are also introduced. To help researchers understand various existing robust watermarking algorithms quickly, some basic information and the quantitative estimation of several performances are analyzed and compared. Finally, we discuss the challenges in the research of robust video watermarking algorithms, and give possible development directions for the future.

Digital image authentication has become a hot topic in the last few years. In this paper, a pixel-based fragile watermarking method is presented for image tamper identification and localization. By analyzing the left and right singular matrices of SVD, it is found that the matrix product between the first column of the left singular matrix and the transposition of the first column in the right singular matrix is closely related to the image texture features. Based on this characteristic, a binary watermark consisting of image texture information is generated and inserted into the least significant bit (LSB) of the original host image. To improve the security of the presented algorithm, the Arnold transform is applied twice in the watermark embedding process. Experimental results indicate that the proposed watermarking algorithm has high security and perceptual invisibility. Moreover, it can detect and locate the tampered region effectively for various malicious attacks.

With the development of image processing technology, the copyright protection of digital images has become an urgent problem to be solved. As an effective method, the robust digital watermarking technique emerges at a historic moment. Currently, most robust watermarking schemes are performed in the transform domains, such as the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). Compared with spatial domain watermarking schemes, these methods have achieved good performance, such as better robustness and higher security. However, the computational complexity increases with the use of forward and reverse transforms. In this paper, we analyze the SVD-based watermarking scheme and its impact on the spatial domain. Based on this analysis and the mathematical characteristics of SVD, we present a robust image watermarking scheme where a binary watermark is embedded into the largest singular value of each image block in the spatial domain. Several experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed watermarking scheme. The experimental results show that compared with the existing SVD domain watermarking schemes, our proposed method has maintained good robustness against various attacks. Moreover, it avoids the false positive problem existing in traditional SVD-based watermarking schemes and has lower computational complexity.

The popularity of image editing software has made it increasingly easy to alter the content of images. These alterations threaten the authenticity and integrity of images, causing misjudgments and possibly even affecting social stability. The copy-move technique is one of the most commonly used approaches for manipulating images. As a defense, the image forensics technique has become popular for judging whether a picture has been tampered with via copy-move, splicing, or other forgery techniques. In this paper, a scheme based on accelerated-KAZE (A-KAZE) and speeded-up robust features (SURF) is proposed for image copy-move forgery detection (CMFD). It is difficult for most keypoint-based CMFD methods to obtain sufficient points in smooth regions. To remedy this defect, the response thresholds for the A-KAZE and SURF feature detection stages are set to small values in the proposed method. In addition, a new correlation coefficient map is presented, in which the duplicated regions are demarcated, combining filtering and mathematical morphology operations. Numerous experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in searching for duplicated regions and its robustness against distortions and post-processing techniques, such as noise addition, rotation, scaling, image blurring, joint photographic expert group (JPEG) compression, and hybrid image manipulation. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme is superior to that of other tested CMFD methods.