EURASIP Journal on Information Security
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 43034, 7 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/43034
Research Article
Reverse-Engineering a Watermark Detector Using an Oracle
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton 13902, NY, USA
Received 7 May 2007; Accepted 22 October 2007
Recommended by A. Piva
Abstract
The Break Our Watermarking System (BOWS) contest gave researchers three
months to defeat an unknown watermark, given three marked images and online access
to a watermark detector. The authors participated in the first phase of the contest, defeating
the mark while retaining the highest average quality among attacked images. The techniques
developed in this contest led to general methods for reverse-engineering a watermark algorithm
via experimental images fed to its detector. The techniques exploit the tendency of watermark
algorithms to admit characteristic false positives, which can be used to identify an algorithm or estimate
certain parameters.