Embedding QR code watermark in divided wavelet domain

The increased commercial activity on the Internet and media industries demand protection of multimedia contents. In this paper, we introduce a novel watermarking method to embed the QR codes in digital images. The method is based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The original image is divided into blocks, and the QR codes are added to the particular bits of the LL2 level coefficients of the selected block according to the visual masking effect of human visual system. It is shown that this method is robust to JPEG compression and with good transparency. The embedded information can be extracted correctly even if the images are compressed into 7 to 15% of the original ones according to the contents of the images.