Parallel Watermarking of Images in the Frequency Domain

Abstract

While the internet has made it possible for the consumer to easily obtain images, audio, video, etc. in digital form, it has also made it easier to illegally obtain copyrighted material. Digital watermarking is a partial solution to this problem. Embedding a watermark in a legal version of material can help the copyright owner to identify who has an illegal copy. Because of the ever increasing enormity of the flow of information, it becomes necessary to watermark files in the least amount of time possible. For this reason it is natural to turn to parallel computing. In this work we compare the performance of three different implementations on a cluster of SMPs, in OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA, of a simple algorithm for watermarking digital images. Our experiments show that CUDA with one gpu is almost 300 times faster than the sequential version and many times faster than OpenMP and MPI using 1 up to 8 nodes.