Robust Image Watermarking Under Pixel Wise Masking Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust image watermarking technique that leverages wavelet transform and human visual system principles, embedding watermarks in perceptually significant areas to enhance invisibility and resilience against various image impairments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel pixel wise masking framework with adaptive thresholding for embedding watermarks, improving robustness and invisibility compared to existing methods.

Findings

Enhanced robustness against compression, scaling, cropping, and filtering.

Improved visual and statistical invisibility of watermarks.

Outperforms a state-of-the-art frequency-based watermarking technique.

Abstract

The current paper presents a robust watermarking method for still images, which uses the similarity of discrete wavelet transform and human visual system (HVS). The proposed scheme makes the use of pixel wise masking in order to make binary watermark imperceptible to the HVS. The watermark is embedded in the perceptually significant, spatially selected detail coefficients using sub band adaptive threshold scheme. The threshold is computed based on the statistical analysis of the wavelet coefficients. The watermark is embedded several times to achieve better robustness. Here, a new type of non-oblivious detection method is proposed. The improvement in robustness performance against different types of deliberate and non-intentional image impairments (lossy compression, scaling, cropping, filtering etc) is supported through experimental results. The reported result also shows improvement in visual and statistical invisibility of the hidden data. The proposed method is compared with a state of the art frequency based watermarking technique, highlighting its performance. This algorithmic architecture utilizes the existing allocated bandwidth in the data transmission channel in a more efficient manner.