Perceptual Digital Watermarking for Image Authentication in Electronic Commerce

Digital watermarking has been presented to protect the copyright of electronic multimedia data. The previous proposed watermarking algorithms mostly embed sequences of random numbers or binary images as the watermarks. In this paper, an image accreditation technique by embedding digital gray-level image watermarks in images is proposed. In the proposed method, the host image and the watermark are decomposed into wavelet coefficients. The contextual energies of the host-image wavelet coefficients are computed to select embedding coefficients. The watermark wavelet coefficients are sorted and then embedded in the selected host coefficients. The experiments show that the proposed method provides extra robustness against JPEG-compression, image-processing, and even composite attacks compared to the traditional embedding methods. Moreover, the proposed method has no need of the original image to extract the embedded watermarks. The proposed method facilitates electronic commerce application developers to select adequate digital watermarking techniques for their development systems.