A visible wavelet watermarking technique based on exploiting the contrast sensitivity function and noise reduction of human vision system

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications Vol. 72; no. 2; pp. 1311 - 1340
• Main Authors: Tsai, Min-Jen, Liu, Jung, Yin, Jin-Sheng, Yuadi, Imam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.09.2014; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Artificial intelligence; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Copyright; Data Structures and Information Theory; Digital technology; Digital watermarks; Exact sciences and technology; Fourier transforms; Human; Image processing systems; Information systems. Data bases; Masking; Memory and file management (including protection and security); Memory organisation. Data processing; Multimedia; Multimedia Information Systems; Neural networks; Noise; Noise reduction; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Performance evaluation; Software; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Studies; Translucence; Vision systems; Watermarking; Wavelet; Wavelet transforms; United States > US; Wavelet; Copyright protection; Noise Visibility Function (NVF); Human Visual System (HVS); Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF); Digital watermarking; Image processing; Noise reduction; Copyright; Translucence; Home ownership; Selection criterion; Masking; Digital protection; Robustness; Computer security; Multimedia; Computer vision; Stéganography; Context aware; Information technology; Game theory; Experimental result; Wavelet transformation; Intellectual property; Internet
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-013-1423-y

With the widespread use of the Internet and the rapid development of digital technologies, copyright protection of multimedia content has become an important issue. Among the available technologies, digital watermarking techniques are regarded as a solution to the property right protection for multimedia resources. To evaluate the performance of a visible watermarking technique, robustness and perceptual translucence are two essential criteria for the watermark applications. In order to get the best trade-off between the embedding energy of a watermark and perceptual translucence, this study presents a technique named ICOCOA (innovated content and contrast aware) by exploiting the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and noise reduction of human vision system in the wavelet domain. Another novel idea of this work is to propose the innovated CSF masking (I-CSF) curve which provides better weight perception where a game-theoretic architecture can be leveraged to determine the best I-CSF masking for the watermarked image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only provides a good translucent quality of the watermark but also achieves the robustness against the common image processing operations.