Reversible watermarking resistant to cropping attack

Abstract

A reversible digital watermarking scheme based on a blockwise difference expansion (DE) method is proposed here. The proposed scheme differs from previous ones in its robustness against cropping and collage attacks. In order to easily detect the correct cropped position for a cropped image, a locating pattern is embedded into the carrier image by a modified patchwork algorithm. Incurred overhead, payload, and authentication information are then collected and embedded into the carrier image by a blockwise DE method. Within the proposed scheme, image ID and block index also serve as parts of the inputs to the hash function. This endows the scheme with capability in resisting collage attacks. The experimental results show that the scheme can achieve a good robustness against cropping attacks as well as collage attacks.