A geometrically resilient robust image watermarking scheme using deformable multi-scale transform

The robust performance against geometrical manipulations is still one of major concerns in robust watermarking although significant improvement has been achieved in past decades. In this paper, we tackle the global geometrical attacks by designing a deformable multi-scale transform (DMST) that has joint shiftability in position, orientation, and scale. Via DMST, we both derive theoretically the principles for geometrical synchronization and develop a template-based scheme to efficiently estimate geometrical parameters. Also, the hidden Markov model in the standard wavelet domain is extended to the steerable wavelet domain and further used to improve the performance of watermark extraction. Experimental simulation demonstrates that the proposed watermarking scheme is quite robust to the common signal processing, geometrical attacks, and their joint attacks.