Robust grayscale watermarking technique based on face detection

Due to increase of usage of digital media distributed over the Internet, concerns about security and piracy have emerged. The amount of digital media reproduction has brought a need for content watermarking. In this paper robust grayscale watermarking technique based on face detection is proposed. Face detection algorithm is used to find a face on host image and this part of image is transformed into frequency domain using Discrete Wavelet Transform. Chirp z-transform is applied on low-frequency subband from previous step and LU decomposition is used on the outcome. Diagonal matrix from LU decomposition is further decomposed using Singular Value Decomposition and watermark is embedded into singular values. Numerous experiments are run on that algorithm and results are compared with novel and state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that proposed method has good imperceptibility and robustness characteristics.