Design and Synthesis of Digital Watermarking Chip Using Inverse Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (IMDCT) in Hardware Description Language (HDL) Environment

Digital watermarking is the process of embedding data, called a watermark, into a multimedia object such that the watermark can be detected whenever needed for digital rights management (DRM). The object may be an image, audio, video, text, or graphics. Watermarking requires two operations, embedding the watermarks with the information and extraction. Because of copyright protection, watermarking techniques are often evaluated based on their robustness, recoverability, and invisibility. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are extensively used in rapid prototyping and verification of a conceptual design and also used in electronic systems when the mask production of a custom IC becomes prohibitively expensive due to the small quantity. The research work focuses the watermarking chip design and synthesis using Inverse Modified Discrete cosine transform (IMDCT) with optimized hardware parameters. The work is carried out in Xilinx ISE 14.2 software and functional checked in Modelsim 10.0 a student edition. The results are tested on Sparten-3 FPGA kit and memory utilization is found 156538 kB