An effective blind image watermarking based on inter-blocks estimation and quantization index modulation

Abstract

Watermarks are used to protect the copyright of multimedia and help us to identify legitimate ownership. Imperceptibility and robustness are always prime concern for the watermarking researchers. Therefore, a simple but effective blind watermarking scheme would be what we expect. In this study, we present a kind of blind watermarking technique, which is based on inter-blocks estimation of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. To satisfy both imperceptibility and robustness requirements while maintaining a sufficient payload capacity, a quantization index modulation technique (QIM) DCT-based scheme is employed. This technique substantial reduces the effect of host data interference, thus having significant advantage over previously proposed DCT-based watermarking schemes. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme to embedding watermarks can effectively to defense various image attacks, especially in image compression attacks and Gaussian noise.