A feature-based robust digital image watermarking against geometric attacks

Based on scale space theory and an image normalization technique, a new feature-based image watermarking scheme robust to general geometric attacks is proposed in this paper. First, the Harris–Laplace detector is utilized to extract steady feature points from the host image; then, the local feature regions (LFR) are ascertained adaptively according to the characteristic scale theory, and they are normalized by an image normalization technique; finally, according to the predistortion compensation theory, several copies of the digital watermark are embedded into the nonoverlapped normalized LFR by comparing the DFT mid-frequency magnitudes. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is not only invisible and robust against common signals processing methods such as median filtering, sharpening, noise adding, and JPEG compression etc., but also robust against the general geometric attacks such as rotation, translation, scaling, row or column removal, shearing, local geometric distortion and combination attacks etc.