A New Visually Imperceptible and Robust Image Watermarking Scheme in Contourlet Domain

This paper proposes a new blind spread spectrum image watermarking method in Contourlet domain, where watermark is embedded through PN sequences in the selected Contourlet coefficients of the cover image. Data embedding is performed in selected sub bands, providing higher resiliency through better spectrum spreading compared to other sub bands. It has been observed that, in comparison with other Contourlet based and wavelet based methods, the proposed method leads to higher imperceptibility and robustness against several common watermarking attacks such as compression, adding noise, filtering and scaling. This property of the proposed method is thanks to its capability in directional selectivity.