Blind Dual Watermarking Scheme Using Stucki Kernel and SPIHT for Image Self-Recovery

Abstract

In this paper we propose a blind dual watermarking scheme using Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) and Stucki Kernel halftone technique for the tamper detection and image self-recovery. The watermark consists of authentication bits for tampering area location and recovery bits for image restoration. We generate two recovery bits to ensure the high-quality recovery of the tampered image. The primary recovery bit is generated by the SPIHT encoding, and the secondary recovery bit is generated by the Stucki Kernel halftone technique. Then the authentication bit is generated based on the recovery bits. Before embedding the watermark, we shuffle the watermark bits through Arnold cat mapping and diagonal mapping to improve the security and quality of the restored image. LSB-based watermarking technique is used to embed the watermark into the original image to ensure the invisibility of the watermarked image. Experiments have been conducted on two datasets, BOW2 and USC-SIPI, and results show that the proposed scheme can achieve high restoration quality. Comparison with the existing works demonstrate the good performance and superiority of the proposed scheme.