Generalized Improved Spread Spectrum watermarking robust against translation attacks

In this work, we consider the ISS (improved spread spectrum) watermarking in Malvar, H. S. and Florencio, D.A.F., (2003) framework, and propose a generalized version of it, termed "Generalized Improved Spread Spectrum" (GISS), where we achieve both host-interference cancelation and robustness to "translation" attacks up to some tolerance. In particular, we reduce the correlation between the watermark and the host, not only at the embedding location, but also within an a-priori-defined neighborhood around it. We show that the resulting framework leads to a constrained quadratic optimization problem, where the cost function and the constraint represent the amount of host interference on the watermark and the norm of the resulting "host interference cancelation sequence" (HICS), respectively. We provide a closed-form analytical solution to this optimization problem and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness for ID signals.