VLSI architecture and chip for invisible watermarking

Research in digital watermarking is mature. Several software implementations of watermarking algorithms are described in the literature, but few attempts have been made to describe hardware implementations. The ultimate objective of the research is to develop low-power, high- performance, real-time, reliable and secure watermarkingsystems, which can be achieved through hardware implementations.

The development of a very-large-scale integration architecture for a high-performance watermarking chip is presented which can perform both invisible robust and invisible fragile image watermarking in the spatial domain. The watermarking architecture is prototyped in two ways: (i) by using a Xilinx field-programmable gate array and (ii) by building a custom integrated circuit. This prototype is the first watermarking chip with both invisible robust and invisible fragile watermarking capabilities.