A game-theoretic system security design for the visible watermarking

Digital watermarking has been widely studied and regarded as a potentially effective means for protecting copyright of digital media in recent years. Among different categories of researches for digital watermarking, visible watermarking protect copyrights in a more active way since the approach not only prevents pirates but also visually recognizes the copyrights of multimedia data. However, how to determine the equilibrium of optimal security strategies between encoder and attacker and the optimal tradeoff between the intensity of embedded watermark and the perceptual translucence for visible watermark is becoming a subject of importance. Therefore, in order to achieve the best tradeoff between the embedding energy of watermark, the quality of perceptual watermark translucence and the image fidelity after attacks, a novel game-theoretic system security design for visible watermarking is proposed in this study. The watermark embedding problem is formulated as a dynamic non-cooperative game with complete information while the optimal strategy is defined by the Nash equilibrium of the game. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach which allows the watermark encoder to obtain the best watermarking strategy under attacks. Accordingly, our research could help to resolve security issue of visual communication.