Bilateral filtering based watermarking for high dynamic range image

As the future of digital photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) has been widely applied in daily applications. However, since the visual quality of HDR images is very sensitive to luminance value variations, the conventional watermarking methods present inefficiency because of introducing many visible image distortions. In this paper, a watermarking scheme targeting HDR images is proposed, which is based on bilateral filtering. Watermarks are embedded into detail part of HDR image which is the residual image between the HDR image and the bilateral filtered image. The objective quality of the watermarked images can be significantly improved by an average of 20dB in PSNR with corresponding improvement in subjective quality. It also shows higher robustness against tone mapping operations.