Cropping-resilient segmented multiple watermarking

Watermarking is a frequently used tool for digital rights management. An example of this is using watermarks to place ownership information into an object. There are many instances where placing multiple watermarks into the same object is desired. One mechanism that has been proposed for doing this is segmenting the data into a grid and placing watermarks into different regions of the grid. This is particularly suited for images and geographic information systems (GIs) databases as they already consist of a fine granularity grid (of pixels, geographic regions, etc.); a grid cell for watermarking is an aggregation of the original fine granularity cells. An attacker may be interested in only a subset of the watermarked data, and it is crucial that the watermarks survive in the subset selected by the attacker. In the kind of data mentioned above (images, GIs, etc.) such an attack typically consists of cropping, e.g. selecting a geographic region between two latitudes and longitudes (in the GIs case) or a rectangular region of pixels (in an image). The contribution of this paper is a set of schemes and their analysis for multiple watermark placement that maximizes resilience to the above mentioned cropping attack. This involves the definition of various performance metrics and their use in evaluating and comparing various placement schemes.