Novel and Robust Image Watermarking for Copyright Protection and Integrity Control

Abstract

This paper presents a copyright protection and integrity verification watermarking scheme for color images. It uses the extracted features of the host image to generate a watermark, which is then embedded in the host image to produce a watermarked image. We have inserted the watermark in the frequency domain using discrete cosine transform. The choice of the positions of the watermark bits depends on a preprocessing study on the original and compressed–decompressed image. Then, we have implemented a blind detection algorithm. In order to counter rotation and cropping attacks, our scheme adopts Speeded-Up Robust Feature to locate invariant key points. The latter are extracted from the original image and used as part of the keys of our scheme to resynchronize only watermarked image altered by rotation and cropping. The robustness and integrity of our method are tested by executing Stirmark 3.1 attacks to the watermarked images. The experimental results show that our method affords a high level of imperceptibility and robustness against JPEG compression, unique and double Stirmark attacks.