Image Processing Pipeline Model Integrating Steganographic Algorithms for Mobile Cameras

Mobile phones these days are extensively used to capture and share multimedia right from the device without the basic security processing like watermarking. This necessitates the need for multimedia to be watermarked right within the mobile hardware for copyright protection and authentication. In this paper, we propose an image processing pipelining model for mobile cameras that integrates watermarking algorithm with the image capturing processes in cameras. Differently from existing works reported in literature, the unique contribution in this paper is to have image watermarked while in the early capturing process. In other words, the processes for digital image capturing and watermarking have become as a single non-separable procedure in the camera hardware systems. The paper proposes watermarking raw image data before it becomes display ready within the image capturing process. Also, the watermarking algorithm used to develop the model, without losing generality, caters to the computational efficiency requirement for mobile devices while being robust against image coding at the same time. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed approach is robust against JPEG compression.