A reversible image watermarking scheme based on a new modulation mode of DCT coefficients

Abstract

Watermarking reversibility is one of the main requirements for medical and some other applications. In these fields even a slight change in the original image can lead to significant mistakes in the decision making process. In addition, the watermarking scheme should allow to embed a large amount of hidden data into the original image. This paper proposes a blind, fully reversible, high capacity scheme that utilizes an Even-Odd Modulation technique to modify the cosine coefficients while embedding the watermark bits. In multi-layer mode the scheme is capable to embed 3145728 watermark bits into the image of size 512x512 with the following indicators: the values of Peak Signal Noise Ratio of the watermarked images are about 70 dB, the Mean Structural Similarity Index Measure between the embedded and extracted watermarks in all cases is equal to one and the scheme allows to restore the original image with 100% accuracy. The validity and superiority of the proposed scheme is verified through extensive simulations.