An entropy-based image watermarking scheme by improving robustness in shearlet and wavelet domain

Abstract

The existing robust digital watermarking schemes mainly embed information in the fixed positions or with fixed embedding strength, while seldom considering adaptive adjustment based on the characteristics of the cover image, thus it reduces the imperceptibility and the robustness of watermarking. Aiming at these issues, we propose a scheme which can be able to dynamically adjust the watermark embedding position and strength. Therefore, it guarantees the trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility. The appropriate embedding positions are dynamically selected for the watermark by comparing the image entropy, and the embedding strength of the image blocks are adaptively adjusted according to the entropy and the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) model in the Human Visual System (HVS)-based wavelet domain. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is performed on the image blocks to ensure the resistant ability of geometric attacks. The experimental results show that the scheme has good imperceptibility as well as strong robustness against various attacks. The robustness in common attacks is improved by at least 1% compared with similar watermarking schemes.