Additional information delivery to image content via improved unseen–visible watermarking

In a practical watermark scenario, watermarks are used to provide auxiliary information; in this way, an analogous digital approach called unseen–visible watermark has been introduced to deliver auxiliary information. In this algorithm, the embedding stage takes advantage of the visible and invisible watermarking to embed an owner logotype or barcodes as watermarks; in the exhibition stage, the equipped functions of the display devices are used to reveal the watermark to the naked eyes, eliminating any watermark exhibition algorithm. In this paper, a watermark complement strategy for unseen–visible watermarking is proposed to improve the embedding stage, reducing the histogram distortion and the visual degradation of the watermarked image. The presented algorithm exhibits the following contributions: first, the algorithm can be applied to any class of images with large smooth regions of low or high intensity; second, a watermark complement strategy is introduced to reduce the visual degradation and histogram distortion of the watermarked image; and third, an embedding error measurement is proposed. Evaluation results show that the proposed strategy has high performance in comparison with other algorithms, providing a high visual quality of the exhibited watermark and preserving its robustness in terms of readability and imperceptibility against geometric and processing attacks

Copyright Protection of Color Imaging Using Robust-Encoded Watermarking

In this paper we present a robust-encoded watermarking method applied to color images for copyright protection, which presents robustness against several geometric and signal processing distortions. Trade-off between payload, robustness and imperceptibility is a very important aspect which has to be considered when a watermark algorithm is designed. In our proposed scheme, previously to be embedded into the image, the watermark signal is encoded using a convolutional encoder, which can perform forward error correction achieving better robustness performance. Then, the embedding process is carried out through the discrete cosine transform domain (DCT) of an image using the image normalization technique to accomplish robustness against geometric and signal processing distortions. The embedded watermark coded bits are extracted and decoded using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to determine the presence or absence of the watermark into the image we compute the bit error rate (BER) between the recovered and the original watermark data sequence. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the well-known indices: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The color difference between the watermarked and original images is obtained by using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides good performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison among the proposed and previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided

Watermarking of HDR images in the spatial domain with HVS-imperceptibility

This paper presents a watermarking method in the spatial domain with HVS-imperceptibility for High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. The proposed method combines the content readability afforded by invisible watermarking with the visual ownership identification afforded by visible watermarking. The HVS-imperceptibility is guaranteed thanks to a Luma Variation Tolerance (LVT) curve, which is associated with the transfer function (TF) used for HDR encoding and provides the information needed to embed an imperceptible watermark in the spatial domain. The LVT curve is based on the inaccuracies between the non-linear digital representation of the linear luminance acquired by an HDR sensor and the brightness perceived by the Human Visual System (HVS) from the linear luminance displayed on an HDR screen. The embedded watermarks remain imperceptible to the HVS as long as the TF is not altered or the normal calibration and colorimetry conditions of the HDR screen remain unchanged. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on several HDR images encoded by two widely-used TFs confirm the strong HVSimperceptibility capabilities of the method, as well as the robustness of the embedded watermarks to tone mapping, lossy compression, and common signal processing operations

Image quality assessment of fast fourier transform domain watermarked images

Digital watermarking is the processing of embedding digital signature into the host media such as image, video, text, audio etc. During the watermarking process, images are subjected to variety of attacks such as noise in transmission channel, geometric attacks,compression, processing like filtering, etc, all this affect the visual quality of watermarked image. Thus, there is a need for image quality assessment of watermarked images in relation to the original images. Several measures of image metrics are available in the field of image processing however they are application based. This paper discusses watermarking in FFT domain and some of the image quality metric that can be applied. Experiments are conducted using the Full Reference (FR) images. We used Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Square (RMS), Structural Similarity (SSIM), Image Fidelity Measure (IFM), Correlation Coefficient Index (CCI) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) as our quality assessment. Result shows that CCI, SSIM, and IFM are most appropriate for measuring quality of watermarking system

Towards Optimal Copyright Protection Using Neural Networks Based Digital Image Watermarking

In the field of digital watermarking, digital image watermarking for copyright protection has attracted a lot of attention in the research community. Digital watermarking contains varies techniques for protecting the digital content. Among all those techniques,Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) provides higher image imperceptibility and robustness. Over the years, researchers have been designing watermarking techniques with robustness in mind, in order for the watermark to be resistant against any image processing techniques. Furthermore, the requirements of a good watermarking technique includes a tradeoff between robustness, image quality (imperceptibility) and capacity. In this paper, we have done an extensive literature review for the existing DWT techniques and those combined with other techniques such as Neural Networks. In addition to that, we have discuss the contribution of Neural Networks in copyright protection. Finally we reached our goal in which we identified the research gaps existed in the current watermarking schemes. So that, it will be easily to obtain an optimal techniques to make the watermark object robust to attacks while maintaining the imperceptibility to enhance the copyright protection

Robust Image Watermarking Based on Psychovisual Threshold

Because of the facility of accessing and sharing digital images through the internet, digital images are often copied, edited and reused. Digital image watermarking is an approach to protect and manage digital images as intellectual property. The embedding of a natural watermark based on the properties of the human eye can be utilized to effectively hide a watermark image. This paper proposes a watermark embedding scheme based on the psychovisual threshold and edge entropy. The sensitivity of minor changes in DCT coefficients against JPEG quantization tables was investigated. A watermark embedding scheme was designed that offers good resistance against JPEG image compression. The proposed scheme was tested under different types of attacks. The experimental results indicated that the proposed scheme can achieve high imperceptibility and robustness against attacks. The watermark recovery process is also robust against attacks