Analysis of Current FPGA-Based Image Watermarking Attempts

Objective: Analysing of current FPGA-based image watermarking attempts to figure out the future requirements for such systems. Analysis: Hardware-based watermarking systems have been studied according to their performance in time, frequency and robustness measurements. A comparison has been made among current systems in terms of robustness, image quality achieved and system performance. Findings: Image watermarking was a very demand area of research in last decades, but hardware based attempts of image watermarking are still few in compare with software implementations although many modern systems nowadays rely on hardware-based real time algorithms. For their flexibility and reprogrammable nature, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) where adopted by many researchers for implementing watermarking hardware algorithms in cases where the need of high speed computations is a critical requirement. We find that many current watermarking schemes need to combine the required watermarking features as image quality measurements, using real size images, adaptable designs, and using FPGA features in using parallel high performance systems.