Lossless watermarking considering the human visual system

Abstract

Due to quantization error, bit-replacement, or truncation, most data embedding techniques proposed so far lead to distortions in the original image. These distortions create problems in some areas such as medical, astronomical, and military imagery. Lossless watermarking is an exact restoration approach for recovering the original image from the watermarked image. In this paper we present a novel reversible watermarking technique with higher embedding capacity considering the Human Visual System (HVS). During embedding we detect the textured blocks, extract LSBs of the pixel-values from these textured blocks considering the HVS and concatenate the authentication information with the compressed bit-string. We then replace the LSBs of the textured blocks considering the HVS with this bit-string. Since we consider the HVS while extracting LSBs and embedding the payload, the distortions in the resulting watermarked image are completely reversible and imperceptible. We present experimental results to demonstrate the utility of our proposed algorithm. © Springer-Verlag 2004.