A Watermarking Co-Processor for New Generation Graphics Processing Units

Recent growth of high speed Internet and high resolution imaging has enabled electronic storage and transfer of digital multimedia contents without resorting to the loss of quality. In order to protect the illegal reproduction of the digital multimedia elements, many researchers have suggested digital watermarking as a feasible solution. Like other signal and image processing works, digital watermarking is a computationally intensive process. For efficient, high performance, real time and low cost watermarking we propose two alternatives: (1) using the graphics processing unit (GPU) available on the modern graphics cards for the complex mathematical computations or (2) implementing a dedicated processor chip, a coprocessor for the GPU, to accomplish the task. In this paper we present the later alternative, a coprocessor for the GPU to do multimedia watermarking for real-time applications.