Energy analysis of multimedia watermarking on mobile handheld devices

The growth of Internet-enabled handheld devices has increased the need for the projection of digital media and intellectual property rights. One way to ensure this protection is via digital watermarking, a process that embeds an imperceptible signature or watermark in a digital file containing audio, image, text or video data. The signature is later used to authenticate the data file and for tamper detection. Effective watermarking can be computationally expensive and place additional drain on the available energy in handheld devices. We present a detailed analysis of the energy requirements and performance of a range of prevalent and proposed algorithms for signature embedding, extraction, and authentication for images. We also discuss the security versus energy trade-offs of these algorithms and study the impact of image resolution on energy and performance.