Halftone Image Watermarking by Content Aware Double-Sided Embedding Error Diffusion

Abstract

In this paper, we carry out a performance analysis from a probabilistic perspective to introduce the error diffusion-based halftone visual watermarking (EDHVW) methods' expected performances and limitations. Then, we propose a new general EDHVW method, content aware double-sided embedding error diffusion (CaDEED), via considering the expected watermark decoding performance with specific content of the cover images and watermark, different noise tolerance abilities of various cover image content, and the different importance levels of every pixel (when being perceived) in the secret pattern (watermark). To demonstrate the effectiveness of CaDEED, we propose CaDEED with expectation constraint (CaDEED-EC) and CaDEED-noise visibility function (NVF) and importance factor (IF) (CaDEED-N&I). Specifically, we build CaDEED-EC by only considering the expected performances of specific cover images and watermark. By adopting the NVF and proposing the IF to assign weights to every embedding location and watermark pixel, respectively, we build the specific method CaDEED-N&I. In the experiments, we select the optimal parameters for NVF and IF via extensive experiments. In both the numerical and visual comparisons, the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed work.

SVD-Based Image Watermarking Using the Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform, Key Mapping, and Coefficient Ordering for Ownership Protection

“…Several algorithms have been proposed in the literature to create robust and imperceptible watermarks. In general, watermarking methods can be divided into three main categories: (i) blind methods [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], (ii) semi-blind methods [14][15][16][17] (iii) non-blind methods [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. A blind watermarking framework for high dynamic range images (HDRIs) is proposed in [1].…”

“…This method provides good quality watermarked images, although it is not robust against geometric attacks such as rotation and scaling. In [2], a new blind error diffusion-based halftone visual watermarking method called content aware double-sided embedding error diffusion (CaDEED) is introduced. By adopting the problem formulation of CaDEED, the optimization problem is solved in order to achieve an optimal solution.…”

Complex Wavelet-Based Image Watermarking with the Human Visual Saliency Model

“…To achieve the above goal, extensive watermarking methods have been proposed in recent years. These methods can be classified in different ways, e.g., spatial domain methods [4] and frequency domain methods [5][6][7][8][9], based on watermark embedding space. Depending on the manner of embedding, the method can be further categorized into additive [10], multiplicative [11,12], and quantization based methods [13,14].…”

Visual Saliency Model-Based Image Watermarking with Laplacian Distribution

“…Therefore, how to protect the copyright of multimedia products is an important issue in the field of information hiding. As an effective copyright protection technology, digital watermarking has been widely investigated by scholars at home and abroad [1][2][3][4][5][6]. It is used to identify the ownership of the original works by embedding some data (such as a logo, meaningful information, etc.)…”