VLSI Architecture of DWT Based Watermark Encoder for Secure Still Digital Camera Design

Digital watermarking is the technique used to embed author´s credentials, logo or some other information into digital images which can be used in authentications for courtroom evidence, copyright claims and other applications. The objective of this work is to develop a feasible and invisible watermark embedding hardware for the secure digital cameras using LeGall 5/3 (Discrete Wavelet Transform) DWT. Bind watermarking tecnique is proposed here. The proposed architecture considers constraints of digital camera such as area, speed, power, robustness and invisibility. The algorithm is evaluated under the attacks like JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compression, noise, scaling and rotation to verify robustness and invisibility properties. Watermarking processor is described using Verilog HDL and synthesized using 0.18 μm technology UMC standard cell library for VLSI implementation.