Complex Wavelet-Based Image Watermarking with the Human Visual Saliency Model

Jinhua Liu,Yunbo Rao,Yuanyuan Huang

doi:10.3390/electronics8121462

Abstract

Imperceptibility and robustness are the two complementary, but fundamental requirements of any digital image watermarking method. To improve the invisibility and robustness of multiplicative image watermarking, a complex wavelet based watermarking algorithm is proposed by using the human visual texture masking and visual saliency model. First, image blocks with high entropy are selected as the watermark embedding space to achieve imperceptibility. Then, an adaptive multiplicative watermark embedding strength factor is designed by utilizing texture masking and visual saliency to enhance robustness. Furthermore, the complex wavelet coefficients of the low frequency sub-band are modeled by a Gaussian distribution, and a watermark decoding method is proposed based on the maximum likelihood criterion. Finally, the effectiveness of the watermarking is validated by using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) through experiments. Simulation results demonstrate the invisibility of the proposed method and its strong robustness against various attacks, including additive noise, image filtering, JPEG compression, amplitude scaling, rotation attack, and combinational attack.

Highlights

With the growing popularity of big data and multimedia applications, a large number of digital multimedia data are generated, transmitted, and distributed over the Internet every day
Inspired by [35], we propose an image watermarking method by using high entropy blocks in this work
To assess the performance of the proposed watermarking method, experiments are conducted by using real images

Summary

Introduction

With the growing popularity of big data and multimedia applications, a large number of digital multimedia data are generated, transmitted, and distributed over the Internet every day. The security of these digital data is a relevant problem. The three indispensable, but conflicting requirements are robustness, invisibility, and capacity [1]. These requirements are mutually reinforcing and have to be solved together. An ideal digital watermarking should achieve good balance among these three requirements

Methods

Results

Conclusion