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Visible watermarking based on importance and just noticeable distortion of image regions

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Abstract

Visible watermarking is the process of embedding data (watermark) into a multimedia object (video/image) such that the embedded watermark is perceptible to a human observer. Many times, visible watermarks occlude important portion of multimedia objects. This paper introduces a visible watermarking algorithm to embed a binary logo watermark at N non-overlapping positions in an image such that important portions of the image are not occluded. The important portions are found through visual saliency computation or available human eye fixation density maps. In the proposed visible watermarking, just noticeable distortion is used to adaptively filter the watermark embedding energy based on the image content. A mathematical model in terms of information-content-weighted-structural-similarity-index and visual importance is proposed to find optimal watermark embedding strength. We tested the algorithm on several color images of different sizes and on several binary watermarks of different sizes and found the results to be very promising as per the requirements in visible watermarking. When compared to the state-of-the-art, we also found that the proposed technique does better in not hiding the details of any test image.

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Acknowledgment

One of the authors, Himanshu Agarwal, acknowledges the University Grant Commission (UGC) of New Delhi, India for granting him a scholarship under the JRF scheme for his research, and Maharaja Agrasen Technical Education Society of India for providing facilities for research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, India

    Himanshu Agarwal

  2. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Debashis Sen & Mohan Kankanhalli

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, India

    Balasubramanian Raman

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  1. Himanshu Agarwal
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  2. Debashis Sen
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  3. Balasubramanian Raman
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  4. Mohan Kankanhalli
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Correspondence to Himanshu Agarwal.

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Agarwal, H., Sen, D., Raman, B. et al. Visible watermarking based on importance and just noticeable distortion of image regions. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 7605–7629 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2685-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2685-3

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