A novel robust image watermarking in quaternion wavelet domain based on superpixel segmentation

Abstract

Feature-based image watermarking is a well-developed area of digital image watermarking. The key advantage of such an approach is the ability to guard against the local desynchronization attacks. However, research in this area usually suffers from the following limitations: (1) The feature points focus too much on the high contrast region and are distributed unevenly. (2) The feature point detector is sensitive to the texture region, and some noise feature points are always detected in the texture region. Based on superpixel image segmentation and quaternion wavelet transform, we propose a digital image watermarking approach which is highly robust against common image processing operations and local geometric transformations. First, the entropy rate superpixel segmentation is used to segment the host image into several homogeneous regions. Then, for each segment region, image feature points are extracted using the SIFER detector, and the affine invariant local regions are constructed adaptively. Finally, the digital watermark is embedded into the local regions by modulating the invariant modulus coefficients. Experimental results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed image watermarking, especially for noise attacks and local desynchronization attacks.