Attacks on quantization-based watermarking schemes

In this work, we introduce an efficient attack for removing the watermark with minimum distortion from quantization-based watermarking schemes. The attack is based on analyzing the quantization error to extract the key parameters of the encoder. The removal of the watermark is done by perturbing enough components of the quantized watermarked signal by half of the estimated quantization step. Simulation experiments show the high effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in hacking known quantization-based schemes for watermarking.