Halftone Image Watermarking by Content Aware Double-Sided Embedding Error Diffusion

• Published in: IEEE transactions on image processing Vol. 27; no. 7; pp. 3387 - 3402
• Main Authors: Yuanfang Guo, Au, Oscar C., Rui Wang, Lu Fang, Xiaochun Cao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.07.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Decoding; Diffusion; Distortion; Distortion measurement; Embedding; Gray-scale; Halftone image; halftone visual watermarking; Multimedia communication; Noise tolerance; noise tolerance ability; optimization; Pixels; Visibility; Visualization; Watermarking
• ISSN: 1057-7149; 1941-0042
• DOI: 10.1109/TIP.2018.2815181

In this paper, we carry out a performance analysis from a probabilistic perspective to introduce the error diffusion-based halftone visual watermarking (EDHVW) methods' expected performances and limitations. Then, we propose a new general EDHVW method, content aware double-sided embedding error diffusion (CaDEED), via considering the expected watermark decoding performance with specific content of the cover images and watermark, different noise tolerance abilities of various cover image content, and the different importance levels of every pixel (when being perceived) in the secret pattern (watermark). To demonstrate the effectiveness of CaDEED, we propose CaDEED with expectation constraint (CaDEED-EC) and CaDEED-noise visibility function (NVF) and importance factor (IF) (CaDEED-N&I). Specifically, we build CaDEED-EC by only considering the expected performances of specific cover images and watermark. By adopting the NVF and proposing the IF to assign weights to every embedding location and watermark pixel, respectively, we build the specific method CaDEED-N&I. In the experiments, we select the optimal parameters for NVF and IF via extensive experiments. In both the numerical and visual comparisons, the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed work.