A Digital Watermark Architecture for Image Authentication Based on Hermite Transform

The paper introduces an invisible image watermarking approach using a binary image as a watermark in combination with the Hermite transform. By using the secret key, the binary watermark is separated into several partial binary images before being embedded into the transform domain coefficients. Embedding is done into several bit planes of the Hermite coefficients to ensure invisibility and robustness. The Hermite transform proves to be efficient in diverse applications and outperforms traditional approaches, especially in block-based image processing. Namely, it is shown that the Hermite transform can be used for image deblocking to mitigate the impact of ringing artifacts and blurring introduced by using the Fourier or discrete cosine transform-based approaches. Our focus is on defining a low-complexity architecture for real-time Hermite-based image watermarking. Therefore, the procedure is adopted to work in a vector manner to facilitate the hardware implementation. The schematic depiction of the design is provided and the complexity is discussed.