Reversible watermarking method based on adaptive thresholding and companding technique

Embedding and extraction of secret information as well as the restoration of the original un-watermarked image are highly desirable in sensitive applications such as military, medical, and law enforcement imaging. This paper presents a novel reversible watermarking approach for digital images using integer-to-integer wavelet transform, companding technique, and adaptive thresholding, enabling it to embed and recover the secret information as well as restore the image to its pristine state. The proposed method takes advantage of block-based watermarking and iterative optimization of threshold for companding which avoids histogram pre- and postprocessing. Consequently, it reduces the associated overhead usually required in most of the reversible watermarking techniques. As a result, it generates less distortion between the watermarked and the original image. Experimental results on regular as well as medical images show that the proposed method outperforms the existing reversible watermarking approaches reported in the literature.

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