An improved robust watermarking scheme based on a shape-specific point and feature-embedding technique

Abstract

This study presents an improved robust watermarking scheme based on the shape-specific point and feature-embedding technique, namely, the Yang’s scheme. In this study, a variant of the radius-weighted mean (RWM) decision rule and an extra rule are employed to promote hiding capacity, while maintaining competitive robustness. Simulations demonstrated that the proposed method is more robust than Yang’s scheme against versatile manipulations; both the hiding capacity and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the proposed scheme are superior to that presented by Yang’s scheme. Moreover, the proposed method has better performance in resisting large-scale noise-addition attacks when compared with Yang’s scheme. Finally, the proposed scheme has an outstanding performance in resisting high compression ratio (CR) attacks from JPEG 2000. Specifically, the extracted watermarks are recognisable when the marked images were compressed by JPEG 2000 with a CR of 253.

Keywords:

• Colour image digital watermarking
• Shape-specific point
• RWM
• Centroid