Improved wavelet-based watermarking through pixel-wise masking

A watermarking algorithm operating in the wavelet domain is presented. Performance improvement with respect to existing algorithms is obtained by means of a new approach to mask the watermark according to the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). In contrast to conventional methods operating in the wavelet domain, masking is accomplished pixel by pixel by taking into account the texture and the luminance content of all the image subbands. The watermark consists of a pseudorandom sequence which is adaptively added to the largest detail bands. As usual, the watermark is detected by computing the correlation between the watermarked coefficients and the watermarking code, and the detection threshold is chosen in such a way that the knowledge of the watermark energy used in the embedding phase is not needed, thus permitting one to adapt it to the image at hand. Experimental results and comparisons with other techniques operating in the wavelet domain prove the effectiveness of the new algorithm.