VLSI Design of Spread Spectrum Image Watermarking

Spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia signal becomes appealing due to its high robustness attribute and is used widely for various applications. Some of these applications demand development of low cost algorithms so that they can be used for real time services such as broadcast monitoring, security in communication. In recent time one similar application of digital watermarking becomes promising that assesses blindly the QoS (quality of services) of the multimedia services which is expected to be offered by the future generation mobile radio network. However, the major shortcomings of the existing SS watermarking schemes are high computation cost and complexity of the algorithm that limits their use for stated purposes. The paper proposes SS image watermarking algorithm using Fast Walsh transform that offers low cost and ease of hardware realization. VLSI implementation using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been developed for the algorithms and circuit can be integrated into the existing digital still camera framework.