Image and Video based double watermark extraction spread spectrum watermarking in low variance region

Digital watermarking plays a very important role in copyright protection. It is one of the techniques which are used for safeguarding the origins of the image, audio and video by protecting it against Piracy. This paper proposes a low variance based spread spectrum watermarking for image and video in which the watermark is obtained twice in the receiver. The watermark to be added is a binary image of comparatively smaller size than the Cover Image. Cover Image is divided into number of 8x8 blocks and transform into frequency domain using Discrete Cosine Transform. A gold sequence is added as well as subtracted in each block for each watermark bit. In most cases, researchers has generally used algorithms for extracting single watermark and also it is seen that finding the location of the distorted bit of the watermark due to some attacks is one of the most challenging task. However, in this paper the same watermark is embedded as well as extracted twice with gold code without much distortion of the image and comparing these two watermarks will help in finding the distorted bit. Another feature is that as this algorithm is based on embedding of watermark in low variance region, therefore proper extraction of the watermark is obtained at a lesser modulating factor. The proposed algorithm is very much useful in applications like realtime broad casting, image and video authentication and secure camera system. The experimental results show that the watermarking technique is robust against various attacks.