Performance analysis on a watermarking method based on double random phase encoding technique

When digital watermarking is used for piracy tracking, different watermarks are needed to be embedded into different distributions of a digital product. Based on double random phase encoding (DRPE) technique, cascaded-phases iterative algorithm and random-phase-shift algorithm, Chen et al. proposed a method to generate many different embedded watermarks from one reference watermark, while the embedded watermark can be recognized by testing the correlation between the recovered watermark and the original reference watermark. In this way, only the reference watermark instead of the embedded watermarks needs to be stored and managed. However, since the recovered watermark may be different from the embedded watermark, especially under any image processing, the correlation between the recovered watermark and the reference watermark may be different from the correlation between the embedded watermark and the reference watermark, which may result in wrong recognition. In this paper, the performance of Chen's method was analyzed with numerical simulations. The results indicated that, to correctly recognize the embedded watermark, the number of generated embedded watermarks with Chen's method is limited.