Reversible watermarking for error diffused halftone images using statistical features

Abstract

This paper proposes a reversible watermarking scheme for error diffused halftone images. It exploits statistical features of 2×2 binary patterns in halftone images to embed data. According to a small look-up table constructed in advance, a state sequence is extracted and losslessly compressed, and the saved space is filled up with the watermark and some side information. We modulate the extracted state sequence into a new concatenated sequence by similar pair toggling, and meanwhile the watermark and the LUT are embedded. The proposed scheme can provide a considerable capacity and the original image can be recovered if its watermarked version is intact. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.