A new approach to high-capacity annotation watermarking based on digital fountain codes

Abstract

Annotation watermarking is a technique that allows to associate content descriptions with digital images in a persistent and format independent manner. It is commonly used in medical applications and, hence, existing schemes have been designed to meet rigorous watermark transparency requirements. As a result, the effective capacity of such schemes is severely limited. In this paper, we present a new approach to annotation watermarking. We adopt the fountain coding paradigm and design a convenient watermark communication architecture which resembles a traditional packet network. Our approach allows for straightforward incorporation of content adaptivity, robustness against cropping and support for multiple data streams. In our study, we focus on high-capacity annotations and we assume different requirements with respect to the fidelity of the watermarked images. Our scheme is robust against lossy JPEG compression and cropping. This paper describes the principles of the proposed approach and presents the results of it's experimental evaluation. © 2012 The Author(s).