NOVEL SELF-REFERENCE BASED IMAGE WATERMARKING SCHEME

Abstract

In this paper, a novel image watermarking scheme based on a self-reference technique is proposed. The meaningful watermark is embedded into a gray-level image according to the relation between the constructed reference image and the original host. In order to be robust against Jpeg compression, the reference image should be robust under Jpeg compression. Firstly, the original image is transformed into DCT domain; and then most of the high frequency coefficients are omitted; after the quantization step and inverse DCT transform, we can obtain a robust reference. By considering the relation between the original image and its reference, we can embed the watermark into the host. The watermark extraction process is oblivious. Experimental results under several attacks show good robustness of the proposed scheme. Especially under cropping and Jpeg compression attacks, the watermark can be extracted with only few errors.