The Watermark Evaluation Testbed (WET)

While digital watermarking has received much attention within the academic community and private sector in recent years, it is still a relatively young technology. As such there are few widely accepted benchmarks that can be used to validate the performance claims asserted by members of the research community. This lack of a universally adopted benchmark has hindered research and created confusion within the general public. To facilitate the development of a universally adopted benchmark, we are developing at Purdue University a web-based system that will allow users to evaluate the performance of watermarking techniques. This system consists of reference software that includes both watermark embedders and watermark detectors, attack scenarios, evaluation modules and a large image database. The ultimate goal of the current work is to develop a platform that one can use to test the performance of watermarking methods and obtain fair, reproducible comparisons of the results. We feel that this work will greatly stimulate new research in watermarking and data hiding by allowing one to demonstrate how new techniques are moving forward the state of the art. We will refer to this system as the Watermark Evaluation Testbed or WET.