Visual saliency’s modulatory effect on just noticeable distortion profile and its application in image watermarking

Perceptual watermarking should take full advantage of the results from human visual system (HVS) studies. Just noticeable distortion (JND) gives us a way to model the HVS accurately. In this paper, another very important aspect affecting human perception, visual saliency, is introduced to modulate JND model. Based on the visual saliency’s modulatory effect on JND model which incorporates visual attention’s influence on visual sensitivity, the saliency modulated JND profile guided image watermarking scheme is proposed. The saliency modulated JND profile guided watermarking scheme, where the visual sensitivity model combined with visual saliency’s modulatory effect is fully used to determine image-dependent upper bounds on watermark insertion, allows us to provide the maximum strength transparent watermark. Experimental results confirm the improved performance of our saliency modulated JND profile guided watermarking scheme in terms of transparency and robustness. Our watermarking scheme is capable of shaping lower injected-watermark energy onto more sensitive regions and higher energy onto the less perceptually significant regions in the image, which yields better visual quality of the watermarked image. At the same time, the proposed saliency modulated JND profile guided image watermarking scheme is more robust compared to unmodulated JND profile guided image watermarking scheme.

► Visual saliency is introduced to modulate just noticeable distortion profile.
► The saliency modulated JND profile guided image watermarking scheme is proposed.
► The proposed watermarking scheme outperforms unmodulated schemes.