QR code based blind digital image watermarking with attack detection code

A QR code based blind digital image watermarking technique with an attack detection feature is described here. The technique describes a key based framework to incorporate image, server port address or website address as watermark data; which increases the extended usability of the embedded data and the adaptability of the verification application. The watermarking problem is formulated as a signal communication problem with watermark data representation, embedding of watermark and attack detection as a source encoding, channel encoding and attenuation detection problems respectively. The mathematical aspects of the respective signal processing problems are extended to digital image watermarking with sufficient background support. The use of QR code ensures extended usability, while the application specific watermark data achieves adaptability of the verification application. The QR code is embedded into the attack resistant HH component of 1st level DWT domain of the cover image and to detect malicious interference by an attacker, a unique image registry code generated from the high frequency structural components of the stego-image is used. The key based approach and the attack resistant embedding domain makes this method robust against visually invariant attacks. The testing results show the compliance of the method with all the proposed aspects.