Nested object watermarking: comparison of block-luminance and blue channel LSB wet paper code image watermarking
Claus Vielhauer, Jana Dittmann · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
Annotation watermarking (sometimes also called caption or illustration watermarking) denotes a specific application of watermarks, which embeds supplementary information directly in the media, so that additional information is intrinsically linked to media content and does not get separated from the media by non-malicious processing steps such as image cropping or compression. Recently, nested object annotation watermarking (NOAWM) has been introduced as a specialized annotation watermarking domain, whereby hierarchical object information is embedded in photographic images. In earlier work, the Hierarchical Graph Concept (HGC) has been suggested as a first approach to model object relations, which are defined by users during editing processes, into a hierarchical tree structure. The original HGC method uses a code-book decomposition of the annotation tree and a block-luminance algorithm for embedding. In this article, two new approaches for embedding nested object annotations are presented and experimentally compared to the original HGC approach. The first one adopts the code-book scheme of HGC using an alternative embedding based on Wet Paper Codes in blue-channel LSB domain, whereas the second suggests a new method based on the concept of intrinsic signal inheritance by sub-band energy and phase modulation of image luminance blocks. A comparative experimental evaluation based on more than 100 test images is presented in the paper, whereby aspects of transparency and robustness with respect to the most relevant image modifications to annotations, cropping and JPEG compression, are discussed comparatively for the two code-book schemes and the novel inheritance approach.