A visible wavelet watermarking technique based on exploiting the contrast sensitivity function and noise reduction of human vision system

Abstract

With the widespread use of the Internet and the rapid development of digital technologies, copyright protection of multimedia content has become an important issue. Among the available technologies, digital watermarking techniques are regarded as a solution to the property right protection for multimedia resources. To evaluate the performance of a visible watermarking technique, robustness and perceptual translucence are two essential criteria for the watermark applications. In order to get the best trade-off between the embedding energy of a watermark and perceptual translucence, this study presents a technique named ICOCOA (innovated content and contrast aware) by exploiting the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and noise reduction of human vision system in the wavelet domain. Another novel idea of this work is to propose the innovated CSF masking (I-CSF) curve which provides better weight perception where a game-theoretic architecture can be leveraged to determine the best I-CSF masking for the watermarked image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only provides a good translucent quality of the watermark but also achieves the robustness against the common image processing operations.