Multireselution quantization-based image watermarking

Illegal duplication and distribution of digital multimedia content over the Internet has been prevalent over the past years. Commercial businesses face millions of dollars in lost revenue each year due to these activities. The traditional approach to data protection is to apply encryption and scrambling. However, these methods alone are not adequate to provide complete content-protection since they cannot protect the data once it has been decrypted and descrambled. A recent technique called digital watermarking is proposed as a complementary approach to cryptography. Digital watermarking is a process in which security or authentication data is imperceptibly embedded within the host data. In this paper, we propose a robust blind image watermarking algorithm for embedding a binary watermark sequence under the wavelet domain. This algorithm demonstrates robustness to some common watermark distortions, or attacks, such as lowpass filtering, JPEG compression, and additive Gaussian noise. Performance comparisons are also given with respect to other robust algorithms.