Robust watermarking to geometric distortion based on image normalization and texture classification

Abstract

In this paper, we present a robust watermarking method against geometric distortions and several attacks of signal processing. In the proposed watermarking method, image normalization is used to get geometric invariant feature and watermark embedding and detection are carried out in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. Texture based image block classification in DCT domain is also used to get major watermark imperceptibility. The proposed watermarking scheme is a public watermarking, where the original image is not available in the watermark detection stage. The experimental results show the watermark imperceptibility and robustness against geometric distortion such as rotation, scaling and various other Affine Transformation, and common signal processing attacks, such as JPEG compression and noise contamination. Also the comparison with the prior methods shows better performance of the proposed method.