Improved performances of Scalar Costa Scheme for images watermarking in an independent domain

In this paper, we studied the performances of the well known side information watermarking scheme, Scalar Costa Scheme (SCS), in independent domain. We have used the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to insert and extract the message. Thus, we improve the performances compromise of the original SCS scheme in terms of robustness, capacity, and undetectability. In our study, we also compare the obtained scheme performances to the well known Spread Transform (ST) based scheme for its proven good properties. We show that using watermarking with side information in independent domain permits to improve the global SCS scheme performances. For example, by studying the bit error rate (BER) in function of the watermark to noise ratio (WNR), we show that the robustness is improved by 1 decade when WNR is equal to 0dB. We also show by studying the capacity (amount of information to be transmitted without error for a given noise level) for the same WNR = 0dB, the capacity of our watermarking scheme is much higher than that of the existing schemes. Finally, the study of probability density functions (PDF) of the original signals and marked ones, allowed us to show that the Cachin-security level of the proposed scheme is satisfied through the use of Independent Component Analysis.