Region-Adaptive Watermarking System and Its Application

Digital image watermarking is one of the most widely used techniques for protection of ownership rights of digital images. The main objective of the majority of research in this area remains to be the improvement in imperceptibility and robustness to attack. In this paper, we present a novel watermarking algorithm using a region-adaptive approach to further improve upon these criteria. The watermark data is embedded on different regions of the host image using a combination of discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition technique. In addition, there is a novel use the region-adaptive watermarking technique as a means to detect if certain types of attack have occurred. This is a unique feature of our watermarking algorithm which separates it from other state-of-the-art watermarking techniques. The watermark detection process uses coefficients derived from the region-adaptive watermarking algorithm in a linear classifier. The experiment conducted to validate this feature shows that all watermark attacks can be correctly detected and identified.