Object watermarks for digital images and video

Abstract

The growth of new image technologies has created a need for techniques that can be used for copyright protection of digital images and video. One approach for copyright protection is to introduce an invisible signal, known as a digital watermark, into an image or video sequence. With the development of MPEG-4, frame-based approach has been migrating to object-based approach. Therefore, object-based watermarking schemes are needed. In this article, we propose a novel blind object watermarking scheme for images and video using shape adaptive-discrete wavelet transform (SA-DWT). To make the watermark robust and perceptual invisible, we embed it in the weighting mean of the wavelet blocks using the quantisation visual model based on the human visual system. Watermark detection is accomplished without the original, unwatermarked object by using statistical detection technique. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme is perceptual invisible and robust against many attacks such as lossy image/video compression (e.g. JPEG, JPEG2000 and MPEG-4), scaling, adding noise, filtering, D/A and A/D conversion, etc.