Until today, digital image watermarking has not been large-scale used in the industry. The first reason is that the watermarking efficiency is low and the real-time performance cannot be satisfied. The second reason is that the watermarking scheme cannot cope with various attacks. To solve above problems, this paper presents a multi-domain based digital image watermarking scheme, where a fast DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) based watermarking method is proposed for synchronization correction and an IWT-DCT (Integer Wavelet Transform-Discrete Cosine Transform) based watermarking method is proposed for information embedding. The proposed scheme has high efficiency during embedding and extraction. Compared with five existing schemes, the robustness of our scheme is very strong and our scheme can cope with many common attacks and compound attacks, and thus can be used in wide application scenarios.

In this Letter, we propose a blind and robust multiple watermarking scheme using Contourlet transform and singular value decomposition (SVD). The host image is first decomposed by Contourlet transform. Singular values of Contourlet coefficient blocks are adopted to embed watermark information, and a fast calculation method is proposed to avoid the heavy computation of SVD. The watermark is embedded in both low and high frequency Contourlet coefficients to increase the robustness against various attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme intrinsically exploits the characteristics of human visual system and thus can ensure the invisibility of the watermark. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other related methods in terms of both robustness and execution time.

For copyright protection, a watermark signal is embedded in host images with a secret key, and a correlation is applied to judge the presence of watermark signal in the watermark detection. This paper treats a discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-based image watermarking method under specified false positive probability. We propose a new watermarking method to improve the detection performance by using not only positive correlation but also negative correlation. Also we present a statistical analysis for the detection performance with taking into account the false positive probability and prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. By using some experimental results, we verify the statistical analysis and show this method serves to improve the robustness against some attacks.

Major challenges of the conventional spread-transform dither modulation (STDM) watermarking approach are two-fold: (i) it exploits a fixed watermarking strength (more particularly, the quantization index step size) to the whole cover image; and (ii) it is fairly vulnerable to the amplitude changes. To tackle the above challenges, an adaptive spread-transform dither modulation (ASTDM) approach is proposed in this paper for conducting robust color image watermarking by incorporating a new perceptual model into the conventional STDM framework. The proposed approach exploits a new perceptual model to adjust the quantization index step sizes according to the local perceptual characteristics of a cover image. Furthermore, in contrast to the conventional Watson's model is vulnerable to the amplitude changes, our proposed new perceptual model makes the luminance masking thresholds be consistent with any amplitude change, while keeping the consistence to the properties of the human visual system. In addition, certain color artifacts could be incurred during the watermark embedding procedure, since some intensity values are perceptibly changed to label the watermark. For that, a color artifact suppression algorithm is proposed by mathematically deriving an upper bound for the intensity values according to the inherent relationship between the saturation and the intensity components. Extensive experiments are conducted using 500 images selected from Corel database to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ASTDM approach.

This paper proposes a contourlet based adaptive watermarking for color images (CAWCI). A color image with RGB space is firstly converted to its YCbCr space equivalent; a luminance (Y) image and two chrominance (Cb and Cr) images are subsequently transformed into contourlet domain respectively; the watermark is embedded into the contourlet coefficients of the largest detail subbands of three images lastly. On the one hand, the embedded watermark is imperceptible because contrast sensitivity function and watermark visual mask are adopted in our CAWCI. On the other hand, the embedded watermark is very robust due to the spread specialty of Laplacian pyramid (LP) in contourlet transform. The corresponding watermarking detection algorithm is proposed to decide whether the watermark is present or not by exploiting the unique transform structure of LP. Experimental results show the validity of CAWCI in terms of both watermarking invisibility and watermarking robustness.

Robustness and invisibility are two contrary constraints for robust invisible watermarking. Instead of the conventional strategy with human visual system (HVS) model, this paper presents a content-adaptive approach to further optimize the constraint between them. To reach this target, the entropy-based and integrated HVS (IHVS) based measures are constructed so as to adaptively choose the suitable components for watermark insertion and detection. Such a kind of scheme potentially gives rise to synchronization problem between the encoder and decoder under the framework of blind watermarking, which is then solved by incorporating the repeat-accumulate (RA) code with erasure and error correction. Moreover, a new hidden Markov model (HMM) based detector in wavelet domain is introduced to reduce the computation complexity and is further developed into a posterior one to avoid the transmission of HMM parameters with only a little sacrifice of detection performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain considerable improvement in robustness performance with the same distortion as the traditional one.

Wavelet tree based watermarking algorithms are using the wavelet coefficient energy difference for copyright protection and ownership verification. WTQ (Wavelet Tree Quantization) algorithm is the representative technique using energy difference for watermarking. According to the cryptanalysis on WTQ, the watermark embedded in the protected image can be removed successfully. In this paper, we present a novel differential energy watermarking algorithm based on the wavelet tree group modulation structure, i.e. WTGM (Wavelet Tree Group Modulation). The wavelet coefficients of host image are divided into disjoint super trees (each super tree containing two sub-super trees). The watermark is embedded in the relatively high-frequency components using the group strategy such that energies of sub-super trees are close. The employment of wavelet tree structure, sum-of-subsets and positive/negative modulation effectively improve the drawbacks of the WTQ scheme for its insecurity. The integration of the HVS (Human Visual System) for WTGM provides a better visual effect of the watermarked image. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in terms of robustness and imperceptibility.

The letter proposes a novel subsampling-based digital image watermarking scheme resisting the permutation attack. The subsampling-based watermarking schemes have drawn great attention for their convenience and effectiveness in recent years, but the traditional subsampling-based watermarking schemes are very vulnerable to the permutation attack. In this letter, the watermark information is embedded in the average values of the 1-level DWT coefficients to resist the permutation attack. The concrete embedding process is achieved by the quantization-based method. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist not only the permutation attack but also some common image processing attacks.

This letter presents an image rectification scheme that can be used by any image watermarking algorithms to provide robustness against rotation, scaling and translation (RST) transformations.

This paper proposed a new watermarking algorithm and implementation in hardware, by which the watermarking process and an image compression process can operate in conjunction, in parallel, and/or without degrading the performance of the compression process. The goal of the proposed watermarking scheme is to provide the bases to insist the ownership and to authenticate integrity of the watermark-embedded image by detecting the errors and their positions without the original image (blind watermarking). Our watermarking scheme is to replace the watermark with one or several bit-plane(s) of the DC subband after 2DDWT (2-Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform) decomposition which is the basic transformation in DWT-based image compression such as JPEG2000. If more than one bit-plane is involved, the position to embed each watermark bit is randomly selected among the bit-planes by a random number generated with an LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register). Experimental results showed that for all the considered attacks except the high compression by JPEG, the error ratios in the extracted watermarks by our algorithm were below 3% and the extracted watermarks were unambiguously recognizable in all the cases. The hardware (FPGA)-implemented result could operate stably in 82 MHz clock frequency. This hardware was merged to DWT-based image compression codec which runs in a real-time in 66 MHz of clock frequency. This resulted in the real-time operation for codec and watermarking together in 66 MHz of clock frequency. The watermarking scheme used 4,037 LABs (24%) of the hardware resource of APEX20KC EP20K400CF672-7 from Altera.

Compared with much research in the spatial-domain and transform-domain watermarking techniques, VQ-based watermarking technique has not been fully treated. A digital image watermarking scheme based on vector quantisation (VQ) is proposed to improve the degree of spreading watermark information. By partitioning the codebook into 3 groups, the scheme tries to embed one binary information for each block. The scheme spreads the watermark information almost evenly over the image with little extra distortion. The experimental results prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the scheme.

The technique of the digital watermarking is one of the ways to resolve copyright ownership and verify originality of digital contents (e.g. text documents, audio, still images, video, etc.). In this paper, we obtained global robustness and minimal error through using frame based watermarking and including DC and AC coefficients of DCT transform, which extended conventional watermarking method having local robustness and error through using block based and/or AC coefficients only. As a result, the high robustness and quality of our method were proved by several attacks such as lossy image compression, linear filtering, additive noise, scaling, cropping and so on. Watermarks embedded by our method are survived most of JPEG compressions.