Watermark removal using pseudorandom desynchronization by selective pixel elimination

Watermarking is one of the most effective tools to countering multimedia content tampering and digital piracy. However, due to widespread availability of watermarking tools and the ease of distribution via Internet, the misuse of watermarking algorithms adapted to distribute malicious information as well as industrial and government secrets is not only possible but prevalent. Therefore, it becomes critical that such embedded data be removed from the multimedia without degrading the quality. In this paper, we propose a general removal method to remove watermarks from images based on pseudorandom desynchronization by selective pixel removal. This method does not assume nor require any prior information about image, watermark or embedding algorithm. We have shown that our method can achieve on average a 50% BER, effectively removing all watermark information without degrading the visual quality of the images.