Robust to JPEG Compression Image Watermarking Scheme Based on Even-Odd Modulation and Error-Correcting Codes
Alexander Bahrushin, Galina Bahrushina, Ruslan Ivanovich Bazhenov · 2018 International Multi-Conference on Industrial Engineering and Modern Technologies (FarEastCon) · 2018
Digital watermarking has been considered as an important technique to protect the copyright of digital content. For a digital watermarking scheme to be effective, it is essential that a watermark embedded in an image resists against various attacks. As JPEG compression is a dominant for Internet applications, digital watermarking schemes that are robust against the JPEG are especially useful. In this paper, a blind watermarking scheme, which is first of all extremely robust against JPEG compression, is proposed. It was attained due to a new way of the watermark embedding into the low frequency coefficients obtained with a global discrete cosine transform. In contrast with existing schemes the developed scheme provides the minimum changes of the coefficients while the watermark is being embedded. To provide very low distortions of an original image in case when the watermark is embedded into a lower frequency range of the image, the even-odd modulation technique was employed. To increase robustness of the scheme, the error correcting technique and error prediction method have been developed in this work, which can detect if errors occurred as a result of the attacks and correct them. The scheme was experimentally analyzed using various quality metrics and watermark removal attacks. The experimental results illustrate the robustness and imperceptibility of the proposed scheme.