Robust Image Watermarking Under Pixel Wise Masking Framework

Abstract: The current paper presents a robust watermarking method for still images, which uses the similarity of discrete wavelet transform and human visual system (HVS). The proposed scheme makes the use of pixel wise masking in order to make binary watermark imperceptible to the HVS. The watermark is embedded in the perceptually significant, spatially selected detail coefficients using sub band adaptive threshold scheme. The threshold is computed based on the statistical analysis of the wavelet coefficients. The watermark is embedded several times to achieve better robustness. Here, a new type of non-oblivious detection method is proposed. The improvement in robustness performance against different types of deliberate and non-intentional image impairments (lossy compression, scaling, cropping, filtering etc) is supported through experimental results. The reported result also shows improvement in visual and statistical invisibility of the hidden data. The proposed method is compared with a state of the art frequency based watermarking technique, highlighting its performance. This algorithmic architecture utilizes the existing allocated bandwidth in the data transmission channel in a more efficient manner.