A novel approach to decoding: Exploiting anticipated attack information using genetic programming

In a watermarking system, the decoder structures are mostly fixed. They do not account for the normal processing or intentional attacks. In the present work, a method of automatically modifying the decoder structure in accordance to the given cover image and conceivable attack is illustrated. The proposed Genetic Programming based watermark decoding scheme is a blind one. It exploits the search space regarding types of dependencies of the decoder on different factors. Especially, information pertaining to watermarked cover coefficients is utilized to reduce host interference, while the conceivable-attack information is utilized to circumvent the anticipated distortion. The actual performance of the genetic decoder is assessed through experiments, which justify the use of intelligent search techniques in signal detection/decoding. Simulation results show that the resultant genetic decoder has superior performance as compared to the conventional decoder against the attacks of Checkmark benchmark.