Adaptive removable visible watermarking technique using dual watermarking for digital color images

Abstract

This paper proposes a removable visible watermarking system based on a dual watermark technique and blind removal. A visible watermark pattern is embedded in the cosine discrete transform (DCT) domain, taking into consideration the texture and luminance features of the watermark and host images to create a visible watermarked image. To prevent illegal visible watermark removal, the original watermark is embedded in an invisible manner in the visible watermarked image by employing the Quantization Index Modulation-Dither Modulation (QIM-DM) technique, thus ensuring that the original watermark cannot be obtained by malicious attacks. The visible watermark removal process is carried out using only the correct user’s keys, without the need for additional information, such as the original watermark or the original host image, which allows a high-quality image to be obtained; however, if the user’s keys used in the removal process are wrong, the visible watermarked image suffers higher distortion in its content, even in non-visible watermarked regions. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms previous related works in terms of blind removal, preservation of the quality of the unmarked recovered image, and higher visual degradation of the content in the recovered image if an illegal removal attempt is performed.