Multiple-description iterative coding image watermarking

Abstract

To embed the multiple watermarks is a way to increase robustness in image watermark. The limitation of embedding multiple watermarks is that the limited capacity of an image severely limits the size of the watermark. Multiple-description coding is a good candidate to solve this limitation by trading off between transmission bandwidth and bit error rate. Traditionally, multiple-description coding is considered in on–off channels where channels are not marred by bit errors but occasional connection outages such as dropped packets. To apply multiple-description coding in image watermarking, we need a form of multiple-description coding for noisy channels instead of on–off channels. In this paper, we propose to add iterative coding in multiple description in order to combat bit errors in image watermarking. We call this method multiple-description iterative coding (MDIC) image watermarking. We tested our system on six images. On average, bit error did not happen until we compressed the image in JPEG to PSNR 36.97 dB. We concluded that MDIC was a very good way to increase robustness for image watermarking.