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A robust content based image watermarking using local invariant histogram

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Abstract

Desynchronization attack is known as one of the most difficult attacks to resist, which can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence causes incorrect watermark detection. Based on multi-scale SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) detector and local image histogram shape invariance, we propose a new content based image watermarking algorithm with good visual quality and reasonable resistance toward desynchronization attacks in this paper. Firstly, the stable image feature points are extracted from the original host by using multi-scale SIFT detector, and the local feature regions (LFRs) are constructed adaptively according to the feature scale theory. Then, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is performed on the LFR, and the local image histogram is extracted from a selected DFT amplitude range. Finally, the bins of the histogram are divided into many groups, and the digital watermark is embedded into LFR by reassigning the number of DFT amplitudes in bin groups. By binding the watermark with the geometrically invariant image features, the watermark detection can be done without synchronization error. Experimental results show that the proposed image watermarking is not only invisible and robust against common image processing operations such as sharpening, noise adding, and JPEG compression, but also robust against the desynchronization attacks such as rotation, translation, scaling, row or column removal, and cropping.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Information Technology, Liaoning Normal University, No.850 Huanghe Road, Shahekou District, Dalian, 116029, China

    Xiang-Yang Wang, Lan Meng & Hong-Ying Yang

  2. School of Information Science & Technology, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, China

    Pan-Pan Niu

Authors
  1. Xiang-Yang Wang
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  2. Pan-Pan Niu
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  3. Lan Meng
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  4. Hong-Ying Yang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiang-Yang Wang.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60773031 & 60873222, the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology of China under Grant No. SKLNST-2008-1-01, the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Information Security of China under Grant No. 03-06, the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology of China under Grant No. A200702, the Open Foundation of Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics Nanjing University under Grant No. 08-02, and Liaoning Research Project for Institutions of Higher Education of China under Grant No. 2008351.

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Wang, XY., Niu, PP., Meng, L. et al. A robust content based image watermarking using local invariant histogram. Multimed Tools Appl 54, 341–363 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0534-y

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