An Efficient Watermarking Method Based on Significant Difference of Wavelet Coefficient Quantization

This paper proposes a blind watermarking algorithm based on the significant difference of wavelet coefficient quantization for copyright protection. Every seven nonoverlap wavelet coefficients of the host image are grouped into a block. The largest two coefficients in a block are called significant coefficients in this paper and their difference is called significant difference. We quantized the local maximum wavelet coefficient in a block by comparing the significant difference value in a block with the average significant difference value in all blocks. The maximum wavelet coefficients are so quantized that their significant difference between watermark bit 0 and watermark bit 1 exhibits a large energy difference which can be used for watermark extraction. During the extraction, an adaptive threshold value is designed to extract the watermark from the watermarked image under different attacks. We compare the adaptive threshold value to the significant difference which was quantized in a block to determine the watermark bit. The experimental results show that the proposed method is quite effective against JPEG compression, low-pass filtering, and Gaussian noise; the PSNR value of a watermarked image is greater than 40 dB.