An efficient wavelet-tree-based watermarking method

This paper proposes a blind watermarking scheme based on wavelet tree quantization for copyright protection. In such a quantization scheme, there exists a large significant difference while embedding a watermark bit 1 and a watermark bit 0; it then does not require any original image or watermark during watermark extraction process. As a result, the watermarked images look lossless in comparison with the original ones, and the proposed method can effectively resist common image processing attacks; especially for JPEG compression and low-pass filtering. Moreover, by designing an adaptive threshold value in the extraction process, our method is more robust for resisting common attacks such as median filtering, average filtering, and Gaussian noise. Experimental results show that the watermarked image looks visually identical to the original, and the watermark can be effectively extracted.

► A wavelet-tree-based blind watermarking scheme is proposed.
► The proposed scheme can effectively resist many image processing attacks.
► The threshold value in the extraction process is adaptable to meet applications.