Perceptual DFT Watermarking With Improved Detection and Robustness to Geometrical Distortions

More than ever, the growing amount of exchanged digital content calls for efficient and practical techniques to protect intellectual property rights. During the past two decades, watermarking techniques have been proposed to embed and detect information within these contents, with four key requirements at hand: robustness, security, capacity, and invisibility. So far, researchers mostly focused on the first three, but seldom addressed the invisibility from a perceptual perspective and instead mostly relied on objective quality metrics. In this paper, a novel DFT watermarking scheme featuring perceptually optimal visibility versus robustness is proposed. The watermark, a noise-like square patch of coefficients, is embedded by substitution within the Fourier domain; the amplitude component adjusts the watermark strength, and the phase component holds the information. A perceptual model of the human visual system (HVS) based on the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and a local contrast pooling is used to determine the optimal strength at which the mark reaches the visibility threshold. A novel blind detection method is proposed to assess the presence of the watermark. The proposed approach exhibits high robustness to various kinds of attacks, including geometrical distortions. Experimental results show that the robustness of the proposed method is globally slightly better than state-of-the-art. A comparative study was conducted at the visibility threshold (from subjective data) and showed that the obtained performances are more stable across various kinds of content.