Full band watermarking in DCT domain with Weibull model

In the framework of maximum-likelihood detection for image watermarking schemes, the conventional Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD), Cauchy and Student’s t distributions often fail to model the pulse-like distributions, such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficient distribution. Meanwhile DCT DC coefficients are often neglected in the image watermarking schemes. In this paper an improved full band image watermarking algorithm with utilization of Weibull distribution modeling the DCT AC and DC coefficients is proposed. Experiments indicate that compared with other popluar distributions such as the GGD, the Weibull model gives a closer fit on the distribution of AC coefficients in absolute domain with a smaller Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and lower Mean Square Error (MSE). The watermarking scheme with Weibull modeling the DCT AC coefficients (Weibull-AC) exhibits strong robustness under the attack of scaling and median filtering. The watermarking scheme with Weibull modeling the DCT DC coefficients (Weibull-DC) yields a better detection accuracy for bright and more detailed images. Combining the above two advantages, the proposed Weibull based full band watermarking in DCT domain (Weibull-FB) further improves its robustness under the attack of JPEG compression and achieves 10.47 % overall increment in the detection accuracy compared with the baseline system while maintaining good invisibility in the view of structural similarity (SSIM).