Reversible Visible Watermarking Technique for Images

This paper proposes a reversible visible watermarking algorithm to satisfy a new application scenario where the visible watermark serves as a tag or ownership identifier, but can be completely removed at the receiver end to resume the original image data. To achieve lossless recovery of the image, the proposed algorithm consists of two processing procedures: data hiding and watermark embedding. In the first procedure, we preserve the information of image region to be covered by the visible watermark in the uncovered image portion. In the second procedure, we embed the watermark based on a user-key-controlled embedding mechanism. The two distinct procedures are integrated into a secure watermarking system by a specially designed user key. With correct user keys, authorized users can completely remove the watermark and losslessly recover the original image.