Self-synchronization adaptive blind image watermarking technique with characteristics of original

Abstract

A self-synchronization blind image watermarking technique based on wavelet transform is proposed in this paper. Synchronization is a serious problem to any watermarking schemes while many existed watermarking did not mention it. Image manipulations such as geometric distortions, even by slight amount, can cause the self-synchronization between watermark embedding and detection process so to make the detector disable. So for any watermark detector, synchronization is the precondition of correct detection. In this approach, a new way to estimate the asynchronous distortion parameters by using the one or two characteristics of the host image is proposed to make the re-synchronization of watermarking technique. The characteristics can be used as private key of detector to enhance the safety of watermark. Independent Component Analyze is adopted by detector so that the detector can extract not merely detect the watermarks blindly without using any information about the host image, watermark and any other embedding and attack information. The time tag is also used in watermark to resolve the problem of the multi-embedded watermark deadlock. That is, the detector can extract all embedded watermarks and determine who embeds his watermark first. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed watermarking technique is robust against watermark attacks produced by Stirmark-the popular watermark test software, such as JPEG compression, scaling, translation, rotation, shearing, filtering.