VQ-based watermarking scheme with genetic codebook partition

To enhance the traditional vector quantisation (VQ) system by adding the watermarking ability, a digital image watermarking scheme, which modifies the VQ indices to carry watermark bits, is presented. This scheme partitions the main codebook into two sub-codebooks by referring to the user-key. Then, for each input vector of the cover image, a sub-codebook is selected according to the watermark bit to be embedding. The traditional VQ coding procedure is then done using the sub-codebook for the vector. Furthermore, to improve the performance of the scheme, a genetic codebook partition (GCP) procedure, which employs the genetic algorithm (GA) to find a better way to split the codebook, is proposed. It is demonstrated that the proposed methods provide faster encoding time, better imperceptibility, stronger robustness under some common attacks, and easier implementation than some related VQ-based watermarking schemes proposed in the literature.