Scalable, Adaptive and Blind Watermarking Approach for Color Images, Robust against Progressive Transmission

An adaptive, scalable, completely blind and robust wavelet-based watermarking approach for color images is proposed. The proposed approach enables scalable watermark detection and provides robustness against progressive wavelet image compression. The binary watermark is divided to three slices and a multiresolution decomposition of each watermark slice is inserted into the selected coefficients of one component image (e.g. red, green and blue component images), adaptively that affect the high activity regions of the image. The watermark insertion is started from the lowest frequency subband of the decomposed component image and each decomposed watermark slice subband is inserted into its counterpart subband of the decomposed component image. In the lowest frequency subband, coefficients with maximum local variance and in the higher frequency subbands, coefficients with maximum magnitude are selected. The watermarked test images are transparent according to the human vision system characteristics and do not show any perceptual degradation. The experimental results very efficiently prove the robustness of the approach against progressive wavelet image coding even at very low bit rates. The watermark extraction process is completely blind and multiple spatial resolutions of the watermark are progressively detectable from the compressed watermarked image. This approach is a suitable candidate for providing efficient authentication for progressive image transmission applications especially over heterogeneous networks, such as the Internet.An adaptive, scalable, completely blind and robust wavelet-based watermarking approach for color images is proposed. The proposed approach enables scalable watermark detection and provides robustness against progressive wavelet image compression. The binary watermark is divided to three slices and a multiresolution decomposition of each watermark slice is inserted into the selected coefficients of one component image (e.g. red, green and blue component images), adaptively that affect the high activity regions of the image. The watermark insertion is started from the lowest frequency subband of the decomposed component image and each decomposed watermark slice subband is inserted into its counterpart subband of the decomposed component image. In the lowest frequency subband, coefficients with maximum local variance and in the higher frequency subbands, coefficients with maximum magnitude are selected. The watermarked test images are transparent according to the human vision system characteristics and do not show any perceptual degradation. The experimental results very efficiently prove the robustness of the approach against progressive wavelet image coding even at very low bit rates. The watermark extraction process is completely blind and multiple spatial resolutions of the watermark are progressively detectable from the compressed watermarked image. This approach is a suitable candidate for providing efficient authentication for progressive image transmission applications especially over heterogeneous networks, such as the Internet.