Reversible watermarking using the human visual system

Abstract

Reversible watermarking for multimedia content (like image data) authentication has become an active area of research in last few years. High embedding capacity and perceptually invisible distortions are the key requirements of reversible watermarking techniques. The human visual system (HVS) properties can be exploited for concealing the distortions in the watermarked image while we attempt to increase the embedding capacity as much as possible. Three reversible watermarking algorithms have been proposed based on the HVS. The first proposed algorithm is an implementation of our theoretical capacity bound. The second algorithm is particularly suited for highly textured images and third algorithm is for all types of images. The third algorithm offers better performance than the first and second ones. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms with respect to the existing algorithms. A new variation of the reversible watermarking technique a?? incremental watermarking a?? has also been introduced. This variation is specially helpful for reversible embedding of visual marks and in certain reversible geometric operations such as zooming.