Robust image watermarking: an invariant domain approach

Watermarking a digital image for the purpose of signature (authorship claim) or fingerprinting (user identification) is a typical application of this fast-emerging technique. In this respect, the embedded watermark must satisfy at least two fundamental requirements: transparency and robustness. In this paper, we propose an image moment-based watermarking scheme. We use a limited number of orthogonal Legendre moments to carry the watermark to guarantee its transparency, and on the other hand, we use a set of affine moment invariants for watermark detection to address the robustness problem under general geometric image manipulations, to which many existing watermarking schemes are especially vulnerable. Experiments show that this approach is effective and promising.