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Histogram modification based image watermarking resistant to geometric distortions

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Abstract

A geometrically invariant digital image watermarking scheme based on histogram modification is proposed in this paper. The feature extraction method called Adaptive Harris Detector with Simulated Attacks is proposed and employed, which adjusts and ranks the response threshold value of the traditional Harris Corner Detector, and trains the input image with several simulated attacks, to extract the most reliable feature points for watermark data bits embedding and extraction. The watermark embedding regions are then found as square patches centering at the selected geometric invariant feature points. In each region, the intensity-level histogram is modified by moving some pixels to form a specific pattern according to the corresponding watermark bit. For watermark extraction, the proposed Adaptive Harris Detector with Simulated Attacks is proposed to restore the watermarked image to its original position if any geometric attack exists, and to retrieve the watermarked regions. According to the pattern of intensity-level histogram distribution in these regions, a sequence of watermark bits is then extracted. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against both the geometric attacks and common signal processing, such as rotation, scaling, cropping, JPEG compression, median filtering, low-pass Gaussian filtering and also noise pollution.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the referees for their valuable comments. This research was supported in part by Research Committee of the University of Macau (MYRG134-FST11-PCM and MYRG181-FST11-PCM) and the Science and Technology Development Fund of Macau SAR (Project No. 034/2010/A2 and 008/2013/A1).

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  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Macau, SAR, China

    Chi-Man Pun & Xiao-Chen Yuan

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  1. Chi-Man Pun
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  2. Xiao-Chen Yuan
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Correspondence to Xiao-Chen Yuan.

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Pun, CM., Yuan, XC. Histogram modification based image watermarking resistant to geometric distortions. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 7821–7842 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2025-z

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