List decoding of Reed Solomon codes for wavelet based colour image watermarking scheme

In this paper we propose the use of list decoding of Reed Solomon codes to improve the robustness of blind frequency domain watermarking schemes in the presence of attacks, specially aimed at the colour aspect of the schemes. List decoding allows to decode errors well beyond the normally used bounded distance decoding algorithms and shows significant improvement when the code rates are low. We compare the results of different families of error correcting codes in order to improve the robustness of a blind, wavelet transform based colour image watermarking scheme. We use four families of error correcting codes to improve the robustness of the watermarking scheme (repetition, Hamming, BCH, and Reed Solomon). The experimental results show consistency with the theoretical approximations and the watermarked images with lower code rates are resistant to a variety of attacks.