An integrated visual saliency-based watermarking approach for synchronous image authentication and copyright protection

This paper proposes an integrated visual saliency-based watermarking approach, which can be used for both synchronous image authentication and copyright protection. Firstly, regions of interest (ROIs), which are not in a fixed size and can present the most important information of one image, would be extracted automatically using the protoobject based saliency attention model. Secondly, to resist common signal processing attacks, for each ROI, an improved quantization method is employed to embed the copyright information into its DCT coefficients. Finally, the edge map of one ROI is chosen as the fragile watermark, and is then embedded into the DWT domain of the watermarked image to further resist the tampering attacks. Using ROI-based visual saliency as a bridge, this proposed method can achieve image authentication and copyright protection synchronously, and it can also preserve much more robust information. Experimental results on standard benchmark demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art watermarking scheme, the proposed method is more robust to white noise, filtering and JPEG compression attacks. Furthermore, it also shows that the proposed method can effectively detect tamper and locate forgery. (C) 2011 Elsevier BM. All rights reserved.