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Geometrically invariant color image watermarking scheme using feature points

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Abstract

Geometric distortion is known as one of the most difficult attacks to resist. Geometric distortion desynchronizes the location of the watermark and hence causes incorrect watermark detection. In this paper, we propose a geometrically invariant digital watermarking method for color images. In order to synchronize the location for watermark insertion and detection, we use a multi-scale Harris-Laplace detector, by which feature points of a color image can be extracted that are invariant to geometric distortions. Then, the self-adaptive local image region (LIR) detection based on the feature scale theory was considered for watermarking. At each local image region, the watermark is embedded after image normalization. By binding digital watermark with invariant image regions, resilience against geometric distortion can be readily obtained. Our method belongs to the category of blind watermarking techniques, because we do not need the original image during detection. Experimental results show that the proposed color image watermarking is not only invisible and robust against common signal processing such as sharpening, noise adding, and JPEG compression, but also robust against the geometric distortions such as rotation, translation, scaling, row or column removal, shearing, and local random bend.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Information Technology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, 116029, China

    XiangYang Wang, Lan Meng & HongYing Yang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China

    XiangYang Wang

Authors
  1. XiangYang Wang
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  2. Lan Meng
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  3. HongYing Yang
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Correspondence to XiangYang Wang.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60773031, 60873222), the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology of China (Grant No. SKLNST-2008-1-01), the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Information Security of China (Grant No. 03-06), the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology of China (Grant No. A200702), and Liaoning Research Project for Institutions of Higher Education of China (Grant No. 2008351)

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Wang, X., Meng, L. & Yang, H. Geometrically invariant color image watermarking scheme using feature points. Sci. China Ser. F-Inf. Sci. 52, 1605–1616 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-009-0125-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-009-0125-6

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