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Difference-expansion based reversible and visible image watermarking scheme

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Abstract

A reversible image watermarking scheme recovers the original cover image after extracting the embedded watermarks. A visible image watermarking scheme embeds watermarks to create a visible watermark effect on the cover image. A general reversible image watermarking scheme embeds invisible watermarks. This paper presents a reversible and visible image watermarking scheme that uses a conventional difference-expansion method. The cover image is first segmented to non-overlapped k×k blocks. Each block is then applied to two watermarking schemes; a difference-expansion based invisible watermarking scheme and a visible watermarking scheme to embed one watermark bit. Exceeding numbers, larger than 255 or smaller than 0, generated from the difference-expansion method require being recorded for a lossless recovery. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme embeds visible watermarks with few recorded exceeding numbers. However, not recording any exceeding numbers still results in a high similarity of extracted watermark image and good quality of recovered cover image.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. This paper was partially supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China under contract MOST 104-2221-E-364-002.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Chien-Chang Chen & Hsin-Cheng Yeh

  2. Department of Information Management, Hsuan Chuang University, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan

    Yao-Hong Tsai

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  1. Chien-Chang Chen
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  2. Yao-Hong Tsai
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  3. Hsin-Cheng Yeh
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Correspondence to Yao-Hong Tsai.

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Chen, CC., Tsai, YH. & Yeh, HC. Difference-expansion based reversible and visible image watermarking scheme. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 8497–8516 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3452-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3452-9

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