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Novel and Robust Image Watermarking for Copyright Protection and Integrity Control

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Abstract

This paper presents a copyright protection and integrity verification watermarking scheme for color images. It uses the extracted features of the host image to generate a watermark, which is then embedded in the host image to produce a watermarked image. We have inserted the watermark in the frequency domain using discrete cosine transform. The choice of the positions of the watermark bits depends on a preprocessing study on the original and compressed–decompressed image. Then, we have implemented a blind detection algorithm. In order to counter rotation and cropping attacks, our scheme adopts Speeded-Up Robust Feature to locate invariant key points. The latter are extracted from the original image and used as part of the keys of our scheme to resynchronize only watermarked image altered by rotation and cropping. The robustness and integrity of our method are tested by executing Stirmark 3.1 attacks to the watermarked images. The experimental results show that our method affords a high level of imperceptibility and robustness against JPEG compression, unique and double Stirmark attacks.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results received funding from the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research under the Grant Agreement Number LR11ES48

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  1. REsearch Groups in Intelligent Machines, National Engineering School of Sfax, 3038, Sfax, Tunisia

    Nesrine Tarhouni, Maha Charfeddine & Chokri Ben Amar

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  1. Nesrine Tarhouni
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  2. Maha Charfeddine
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  3. Chokri Ben Amar
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Correspondence to Nesrine Tarhouni.

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Tarhouni, N., Charfeddine, M. & Ben Amar, C. Novel and Robust Image Watermarking for Copyright Protection and Integrity Control. Circuits Syst Signal Process 39, 5059–5103 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-020-01401-1

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