A Large Capacity Histogram-Based Watermarking Algorithm for Three Consecutive Bins

Abstract

The histogram watermark, which performs watermark embedding by slightly modifying the histogram of the original image, has been a hot research topic in information hiding technology due to the superiority of its pixel modification during the watermark embedding process, which is independent of the pixel position. This property makes the histogram-based watermark strong resistant to geometric attacks, such as cropping attack, crossed attack, rotation attack, etc. In this paper, we propose a large capacity histogram-based robust watermarking algorithm based on three consecutive bins for the first time. In our scheme, we divide the shape of three consecutive bins into eight cases. According to these cases, we embed Information Number 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7, respectively. The embedded information capacity reaches one bit per bin (bpb), and the amount of embedded information is equal to 200% of the previous existing algorithms. Experimental results show that the new algorithm not only has a large capacity of embedding information, but also has strong robustness to geometric attacks, as well as common image processing operations.