Joint robust watermarking and image compression

A joint watermarking and compression (JWC) paradigm is considered for the application of JPEG image compression to achieve an efficient tradeoff among the embedding rate, compression rate, embedding distortion, and robustness against a class of “natural” signal processing attacks, including spatial filtering, image resizing and rotation, random row and column deleting, and JPEG2000 recompression. This paper makes two novel contributions: First, a new JWC embedding method called joint odd-even watermarking and JPEG compression scheme is proposed to optimize compression rate and embedding distortion when watermarks are embedded into JPEG compressed images. Second, low-density parity-check codes are employed into the JWC system to obtain an efficient tradeoff between the embedding rate and robustness. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the recently designed DEW (differential energy watermarking), DQW (differential quantization watermarking) and RA-SEC (repeat-accumulate code based selectively embedding in coefficients) schemes, in terms of compression rate, embedding distortion and robustness under the same embedding rate.