Hardware Accelarator for Image Watermarking Technique

The watermarking technique is a potential solution for copyright protection, authentication and integrity verification of digital media. Among the widely used watermarking techniques, "spread spectrum modulation based method" becomes appealing due to its inherent advantage of greater robustness and is used widely for various applications. Some of the watermarking applications are digital television broadcasting, internet protocol television. These applications essentially demand development of low cost watermark algorithms in order to implement in real-time environment. The algorithm uses "a block based multiple bit spatial domain spread spectrum image watermarking scheme". In this scheme a grayscale watermark image can be represented by reduced number of binary digits using channel coding and spatial bi-phase modulation principle.
The algorithm so developed is coded in verilog (HDL language). Tools used are Xilinx9.1 and ModelSim 6.3g.