Image watermarking by moment invariants

We present a novel technique for watermarking digital images based on its moments. The watermark is composed of the mean of several functions of the second and third order moments designed to be invariant to scaling and orthogonal transformations this has the advantage of making the watermark image dependent. The watermarked image is a linear combination of the original image and a weighted nonlinear transformation of the original. The weight is computed such that the mean of the watermarked image invariants is a predefined number. Watermark detection is as simple as computing the moment invariants of the received image. Our approach has a guaranteed visual transparency up to a contrast modification. The proposed algorithm has proved to be highly robust to all geometric manipulations, filtering, compression and small cropping which are performed as part of StirMark attacks as well as noise addition, both Gaussian and salt and pepper.