WATERMARKING WITH REFINED PERCEPTUAL MASKING TUNED FOR SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR IMAGES

A watermarking scheme designed for remote sensing images needs to meet the same demand of both invisibility as for ordinary digital images. Due to specific perceptual characteristics of Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) images, the watermarking algorithms with consideration of Human Vision System(HVS) modeling from optical images give poor performance when applied on SAR images. This paper examines a variety of factors affecting the noise sensitivity, and further proposes a refined pixel-wise masking approach for watermarking on SAR images. The proposed approach is applied on logarithmic transformed SAR images, and has increased the acceptable watermark embedding strength by about 6 dB to 10 dB while achieving the same levels of watermarked image visual quality. Experimental results show that this approach enhanced the perceptual invisibility of watermarking based on wavelet decomposition.