A Robust Spatial Domain Binary Signature Watermarking Technique

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to discuss existing spatial domain watermarking algorithms and propose novel improvements to these algorithms for binary signature watermarking. Considerable research has been pursued on watermarking in spatial, frequency and other domains. We first review both generic and domain specific watermarking techniques and then propose a novel spatial domain watermarking technique for grayscale and color images. Our proposed technique adaptively embeds a visually meaningful binary signature in an image without affecting the perceptual quality of the image. The proposed algorithm employs two stages such as the signature embedding and signature detection. In the first stage, we embed an identifying signature in the original image using a novel adaptive lookup scale. The lookup scale automatically adapts the intensity variation in the host image to address the variability in the watermark signature. The signature is recognized in the second stage to identify the owner of the image. Our proposed technique alleviates the general lack of robustness of the spatial domain watermarking techniques. Furthermore, our spatial domain watermarking algorithm is inherently less complex and faster than the traditionally more robust frequency domain techniques.