VLSI implementation of invisible digital watermarking algorithms towards the development of a secure JPEG encoder

The research in digital watermarking is well matured. Several watermarking algorithms have been proposed for image, video, audio and text in the current literature. Digital watermarking is the process that embeds data, called a watermark, into a multimedia object such that the watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the object. The number of software implementations of the proposed algorithms is significantly large, whereas a hardware implementations is lacking. Hardware implementation has advantages over software implementation in terms of low power, high performance, and reliability. We have developed a hardware system that can insert both robust and fragile invisible watermarks in the image. The hardware module can be easily incorporated in a JPEG encoder to develop a secure JPEG encoder. The watermark module is implemented using 0.35 μm CMOS technology. To our knowledge, this is the first watermarking chip implementing both invisible-robust and invisible-fragile watermarks.