HVS-based scalable image watermarking

This paper proposes a novel human vision system based, spread spectrum method to scalable image watermarking. A scalable decomposition of the watermark is spread into the entire frequency sub-bands of the wavelet decomposed image. At each wavelet sub-band, the watermark data are inserted into the selected coefficients of the sub-band in a manner that the watermark embedding visual artifact occurs in the highly textured, highly contrasted and very dark/bright areas of the image. In the lowest frequency sub-band of wavelet transform, the coefficients are selected by independent analysis of texture, contrast and luminance information. In high frequency sub-bands, the coefficient selection is done by analyzing coefficients amplitude and local entropy. The experimental results show that the watermarked test images are highly transparent and robust against scalable wavelet-based image coding even at very low bit-rate coding. The proposed approach can guarantee content authentication for scalable coded images, especially on heterogeneous networks which different users with different process capabilities and network access bandwidth use unique multimedia sources.