Reliable adaptive watermarking scheme integrated with JPEG2000

In this paper, a new digital watermarking method, integrated with the state-of-the-art image compression standard - JPEG2000, is developed. The binary digital watermark is embedded in the quantized wavelet coefficients in subbands with intermediate resolution after the stage of quantization and recovered before dequantization during decompression. Different from previously proposed JPEG2000 based watermarking schemes, the compression ratio, regarded as an important parameter, is used to design the new adaptive watermark encoder. The strength of watermark is designed as proportional to the compression ratio such that the embedded watermark can survive the following code-stream rate allocation procedure without degrading the image quality. The experimental results show that the proposed system is robust to common image distortions and processing.