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Robust Complementary Dual Image Watermarking in Subbands Derived from the Laplacian Pyramid, Discrete Wavelet Transform, and Directional Filter Bank

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Abstract

This paper presents a robust dual blind image watermarking method that exploits the contourlet decomposition and discrete wavelet transform (DWT). After using the Laplacian pyramid, DWT, and directional filter bank to decompose a host image into separate subbands, the proposed method embeds the primary watermark into low-frequency directional subbands using progressive quantization index modulation (PQIM) and the secondary watermark into mid-frequency DWT subbands using relative modulation (RM). With the incorporation of moment-based rectification, the proposed watermarking method holds adequate resilience against rotation, scaling, and translation attacks. The experimental results confirm that the PQIM in the low-frequency subbands is highly robust against high-frequency attacks such as JPEG compression and lowpass filtering. On the other hand, the RM in the mid-frequency subbands can survive low-frequency attacks such as histogram equalization and unsharp filtering. Such a complementary property enables the development of a watermark merging scheme to resist a wide range of attacks. In comparison with five other dual image watermarking methods, the proposed approach shows improved performance in robustness while maintaining satisfactory imperceptibility.

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Acknowledgements

This research work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC under grant MOST 109-2221-E-197-031.

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  1. National I-Lan University, Yi-Lan, Taiwan, ROC

    Hwai-Tsu Hu & Tung-Tsun Lee

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Hu, HT., Lee, TT. Robust Complementary Dual Image Watermarking in Subbands Derived from the Laplacian Pyramid, Discrete Wavelet Transform, and Directional Filter Bank. Circuits Syst Signal Process 41, 4090–4116 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-022-01975-y

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