As an efficient watermark attack method, geometric distortions destroy the
synchronization between watermark encoder and decoder. And the local geometric
distortion is a famous challenge in the watermark field. Although a lot of
geometric distortions resilient watermarking schemes have been proposed, few of
them perform well against local geometric distortion like random bending attack
(RBA). To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel watermark
synchronization process and the corresponding watermarking scheme. In our
scheme, the watermark bits are represented by random patterns. The message is
encoded to get a watermark unit, and the watermark unit is flipped to generate
a symmetrical watermark. Then the symmetrical watermark is embedded into the
spatial domain of the host image in an additive way. In watermark extraction,
we first get the theoretically mean-square error minimized estimation of the
watermark. Then the auto-convolution function is applied to this estimation to
detect the symmetry and get a watermark units map. According to this map, the
watermark can be accurately synchronized, and then the extraction can be done.
Experimental results demonstrate the excellent robustness of the proposed
watermarking scheme to local geometric distortions, global geometric
distortions, common image processing operations, and some kinds of combined
attacks