A Feature-Based Digital Image Watermarking for Copyright Protection and Content Authentication

In this paper, a feature-based robust digital image watermarking algorithm is proposed to achieve the goal of image authentication and protection simultaneously. The Hessian-Affine feature detector is at first adopted to extract characteristic regions of an image in the proposed watermark embedding scheme. Then the copyright watermark is embedded into these characteristic regions according to the local orientation of each pixel. Moreover, the remainder regions are applied for image authentication by using block-wise fragile watermarking method. Similarly, the proposed watermark detection scheme follows the above procedure to extract the copyright watermark and the authentic information independently and blindly from watermarked images. Various attacks are also applied to the watermarked images in order to examine the robustness of our algorithm. The experimental results in this paper show that the proposed watermarking algorithm can resist most removal and geometric attacks. Besides, changes or modifications of an image will be reflected in our hidden watermarks.