A Contrast-Sensitive Reversible Visible Image Watermarking Technique

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 19; no. 5; pp. 656 - 667
• Main Authors: Yang, Ying, Sun, Xingming, Yang, Hengfu, Li, Chang-Tsun, Xiao, Rong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.05.2009; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Approximation; Coding, codes; Computer science; Cryptography; Data compression; Distortion; Exact sciences and technology; Humans; Image processing; Image reconstruction; Image restoration; information hiding; Information, signal and communications theory; lossless recovery; Mathematical analysis; Operation, maintenance, reliability of teleprocessing networks; Pixel; Pixels; Recovery; Resists; reversible watermarking; Signal and communications theory; Signal processing; Sun; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; visible watermarking; Watermarking; Availability; Lossless circuit; Image processing; Data compression; information hiding; lossless recovery; Image restoration; visible watermarking; Adaptive method; Copyright; Information protection; reversible watermarking; Intellectual property; Computer security; Piracy; Digital watermarking
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2009.2017401

A reversible (also called lossless, distortion-free, or invertible) visible watermarking scheme is proposed to satisfy the applications, in which the visible watermark is expected to combat copyright piracy but can be removed to losslessly recover the original image. We transparently reveal the watermark image by overlapping it on a user-specified region of the host image through adaptively adjusting the pixel values beneath the watermark, depending on the human visual system-based scaling factors. In order to achieve reversibility, a reconstruction/recovery packet, which is utilized to restore the watermarked area, is reversibly inserted into non-visibly-watermarked region. The packet is established according to the difference image between the original image and its approximate version instead of its visibly watermarked version so as to alleviate its overhead. For the generation of the approximation, we develop a simple prediction technique that makes use of the unaltered neighboring pixels as auxiliary information. The recovery packet is uniquely encoded before hiding so that the original watermark pattern can be reconstructed based on the encoded packet. In this way, the image recovery process is carried out without needing the availability of the watermark. In addition, our method adopts data compression for further reduction in the recovery packet size and improvement in embedding capacity. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme compared to the existing methods.