An integrated progressive image coding and watermark system

The design of an integrated image coding and watermark system with the wavelet transform is examined in this work. First, the multi-threshold wavelet codec (MTWC) is used to achieve the image compression purpose. Unlike other embedded wavelet coders which use a single initial threshold in their successive approximate quantization (SAQ), MTWC adopts different initial thresholds in different subbands. A superior rate-distortion tradeoff is achieved by MTWC with a low computational complexity. Then, a non-invertible progressive watermark scheme is incorporated in MTWC for copyright protection. This watermark scheme uses the user input data to produce a Gaussian distribution pseudorandom watermark in the wavelet domain. The performance of the proposed watermark technology is supported by experimental results