Wavelet domain watermark embedding strategy using TTCQ quantization

Invisible digital watermarks have been proposed as a method for discouraging illicit copying and distribution of copyright material. Due to its characteristics, one of the problems in image watermarking is to decide how to hide in an image as many bits of information as possible while ensuring that the information can be correctly retrieved at the detecting stage, even after various attacks. Several approaches based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) have been proposed to address the problem of image watermarking. The advantage of DWT relative to the DCT is that it allows for localized watermarking of the image. The central contribution of this paper is to develop a watermarking algorithm, resilient to like lossy compression attack, by exploring the use of turbo trellis-coded quantization techniques (turbo TCQ) on the wavelet domain. Our results indicate that the proposed approach performs well against lossy wavelet-based compression attacks such as JPEG2000 and SPIHT.