Multiplicative Watermarking Method with the Visual Saliency Model Using Contourlet Transform

Abstract

We have proposed an image adaptive watermarking method by using contourlet transform. Firstly, we have selected high-energy image blocks as the watermark embedding space through segmenting the original image into nonoverlapping blocks and designed a watermark embedded strength factor by taking advantage of the human visual saliency model. To achieve dynamic adjustability of the multiplicative watermark embedding parameter, the relationship between watermark embedded strength factor and watermarked image quality is developed through experiments with the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM), respectively. Secondly, to detect the watermark information, the generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) has been utilized to model the contourlet coefficients. Furthermore, positions of the blocks selected, watermark embedding factor, and watermark size have been used as side information for watermark decoding. Finally, several experiments have been conducted on eight images, and the results prove the effectiveness of the proposed watermarking approach. Concretely, our watermarking method has good imperceptibility and strong robustness when against Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, scaling, rotation, median filtering, and Gaussian filtering attack.