A novel blind robust image watermarking in DCT domain using inter-block coefficient correlation

Abstract

This paper presents a novel blind watermarking algorithm in DCT domain using the correlation between two DCT coefficients of adjacent blocks in the same position. One DCT coefficient of each block is modified to bring the difference from the adjacent block coefficient in a specified range. The value used to modify the coefficient is obtained by finding difference between DC and median of a few low frequency AC coefficients and the result is normalized by DC coefficient. The proposed watermarking algorithm is tested for different attacks. It shows very good robustness under JPEG image compression as compared to existing one and also good quality of watermark is extracted by performing other common image processing operations like cropping, rotation, brightening, sharpening, contrast enhancement etc.