On the robustness of Harris detector in image watermarking attacks

Abstract This paper investigates the misplacement issue presented on the detection of feature points by using the well-known Harris detector, under several watermarking attacks. Harris detector, as a powerful tool in finding image's points of high importance, called “interest points”, has been widely used to locate specific image portions where watermarks are embedded, according to some watermarking insertion procedure. Although Harris detector constitutes a significant part of a typical feature-based watermarking process, no work dealing with its performance under certain attacks has been reported yet. This work studies the accuracy of Harris detector in finding the feature points, which define the watermarked regions of attacked images, firstly as an individual processing module and secondly as a part of a feature-based watermarking methodology. Detailed theoretical analysis followed by appropriate simulation experiments has shown that the incorporation of the Harris detector into the watermarking procedure presents misplacement issues that can lead the watermarking algorithm to unreliable results. In the way of decreasing these misplacement errors, a novel algorithm that extracts more stable interest points, with promising performance is also proposed.