A semi-blind robust watermarking scheme based on most perceptually important region of images

This paper presents a new semi-blind robust image watermarking scheme based on most perceptually important sub-image (MPISI) of watermark and original image. The proposed method is based on lossless approach and to prevent false-positive watermark detection in this approach, a watermark certificate is inserted in the image. Therefore, the proposed method has two phases; in the first phase, the MPISI of watermark is inserted as a certificate in the MPISI of original image. In the second phase, the watermark is inserted in the image by a lossless approach. Also, in embedding procedure, a secret image and a secret key are created based on DC coefficients of MPISI of the original image and similarity between DCT coefficients of watermarked image and watermark, respectively. In the extraction procedure, the original image is not required and only the secret image and secret key are used. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme was robust against various attacks such as JPEG compression, filtering, cropping, and additive Noise while the quality of extracted watermark was acceptable.