Analysis and comparison of typical reversible watermarking methods

Abstract

In sensitive imagery, such as deep space exploration, military reconnaissance and medical diagnosis, traditional watermarks can be hardly found useful. The main reason is that the users are too worried about the loss of original information after the image being embedded with other data. Although early watermarking methods only distort the host signal imperceptibly, there is still some host information that may be permanently (irreversibly) lost. To avoid this disadvantage, some researchers (e.g. [1]-[3]) proposed the concept of reversible (lossless) watermark. Recently, more and more reversible watermarking methods have been proposed. However, the influence of [1]-[3] is obvious. In this paper, we focus on analyzing and comparing these three reversible watermarking methods. Our investigation covers several aspects including data hiding capacity, image quality, capacity resilience and control, computational complexity, security, and blind data extraction. Such analysis and comparison provide indispensable information for the design of new reversible watermarking techniques. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.