The objective of CERTIMARK project can be summarized as follows:
· design, develop and publish a complete benchmark suite for watermarking technologies within promising application scenarios,
· make this benchmark suite a reference tool both for technology supplier and for technology customer within promising applications scenarios,
· set up a certification process for both image and video watermarking algorithms,
· definitely bring the European technological offer in a dominant position for protecting pictures and video in the context of E-commerce over the Internet.
The project was focused on pending key issues in watermarking for protection of still pictures and low bite rate video the Internet. EPFL was mainly involved in the development of efficient watermarking algorithms for still images, video and three-dimensional models. In addition, it helped in the definition of various requirements in the evaluation process, and the certification conditions. It was also involved in the dissemination of the results of the projects in the scientific and technical communities. Emphasis has been given to the development of compressed domain security solutions The JPEG 2000 coding standard has been considered as the image compression algorithm and watermarking, authentication and conditional access solutions have been developed in this framework; the watermarking scheme resorts to a spread-spectrum-like technique applied in the wavelet domain, the authentication consists in a lossless marking, JPEG 2000-compatible, of the compressed image and the control access facility is obtained by the insertion of removable distortion noises.
Moreover, EPFL has been deeply involved in the exploration of the emerging domain of watermarking of 3D objects. A 3D watermarking algorithm over polygonal meshes has been developed and it is available at display the error values on the surface itself. MESH is an open-source (GPL) software available at
http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~aspert/stegano3d. This new technique that embeds the information in the geometry of the model allows its extraction without the original model, it is robust towards attacks such as translation and rotation and besides it is fast extracted. In order to evaluate the performance of 3D watermarking techniques, a new tool has been created by EPFL. Its name is MESH which stands for 'Measuring Error between Surfaces using the Hausdorff distance'.
MESH is a tool that measures distortions (maximum, mean and root-mean square errors) between two discrete surfaces (triangular meshes). The tool aims at having quantitative measurements of the distortions introduced by the watermarking algorithm. Besides, providing figures, MESH can also display the error values on the surface itself. MESH is an open-source (GPL) software available at
http://mesh.epfl.ch.More information about this project can be obtained at:
http://www.certimark.org
