WAVELET-BASED WATERMAKING METHOD FOR MOVING IMAGES USING HVS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Watermarking is finding more and more support as a possible solution for the protection of intellectual property rights. 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). Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) exhibiting a strong similarity to the way the HVS processes images. The video sequence is partitioned into frames and the single shots are projected onto the DWT domain. If a DWT coefficient is modified, only the region of the image where the particular frequency corresponding to that coefficient is present will be modified. This property is utilized while embedding the watermark. The proposed mask takes into account the variance and the luminance of the sub-bands where the watermark is embedded. Finally, the inverse DWT is performed thus obtaining the watermarked vid...