Joint trellis-coded quantization watermarking for JPEG2000 images

Abstract

Watermarking in the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)2000 coding pipeline is investigated in this paper. A joint quantization and watermarking method based on trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) is proposed to reliably embed data during the quantization stage of the JPEG2000 part 2 codec. The central contribution of this work is the use of a single quantization module to jointly perform quantization and watermark embedding at the same time. The TCQbased watermarking technique allows embedding the watermark in the detail sub-bands of one or more resolution levels except the first one. Watermark recovery is performed after image decompression. The performance of this joint scheme in terms of image quality and robustness against common image attacks was estimated on real images.