Linear chirps, a special case of polynomial phase exponentials, have recently been proposed for digital watermarking. In this
work, we propose a known-host-state methodology for designing image watermarks that are robust to compression. We use a two-dimensional
frequency-modulated chirp as a spreading function in a block-based spatial watermarking scheme. In each block, the chirp is
used to embed binary phase information. Chirp parameters allow for spectral shaping of the watermark to match host content.
Since host state is known to the embedder, it is possible to tune the chirp for optimum performance, particularly against
compression. In contrast to existing chirp watermarking where only a single watermark is generally embedded, the proposed
block chirp watermarking allows for a much higher payload. Detection is done using chirp transform subject to key exchange
for security. We show that the proposed method significantly outperforms non-adaptive watermarking across all compression
factors under variety of attacks.
Keywords Digital watermarking - Time–frequency - Chirp - Frequency-modulated function - Compression - Attack
This work was supported by ONR under Grant No. N00014-04-1-0630. Parts of this work were presented at SPIE Annual Conference,
Denver, CO, August 2004, and IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Philadelphia, PA,
March 2005.