Multipurpose Image Watermarking Scheme Based on Self-Embedding and Data Hiding into Halftone Image

Abstract

Nowadays the digital problems, such as copyright violation and content alteration, have been grown. To solve these problems, many watermarking based schemes have been proposed, however most of them address to solve one of these two problems. This work shows a way to embed the watermark for both purposes: copyright protection and content authentication. The main scheme is based on a self-embedding algorithm which generates the watermark sequence from the original image using halftoning method. The halftone watermark image furthermore is watermarked modifying their pixels to embed logotype related to the owner’s copyright; and the watermarked halftone image is embedded for content authentication using Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) in the Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) domain.