Image Watermarking based on Saliency Detection and Multiple Transformations

An ideal image watermarking (IW) scheme aims to manage the trade-off among quality, capacity, and robustness. However, our literature survey reveals some flaws in the form of poor robustness and quality or low embedding capability. In this paper, multiple frequency domain based image watermarking scheme using salient (eye-catching) object detection is applied. Specifically, the host and the watermark images are partitioned into background and foreground regions by the proposed multi-dimension decomposition, which accumulates image patches and combining them to form the salient map. Next, the watermark image is encrypted by multiple applications of the 3D Arnold and logistic maps, then embedded into both the identified foreground and background regions of the host image by using different embedding strengths. The proposed method can embed 1 color pixel of the watermark image into 1 color pixel in the host image while maintaining high image quality. In the best case scenario, we could embed a 24-bit image as the watermark into a 24-bit image of the same dimension while maintaining an average RGB-SSIM of 0.9999. Experiments are carried out (with 10K MSRA dataset images) to verify the performance of the proposed method and to compare our proposed method against the state-of-the-art (SOTA) watermarking methods.