Color image watermarking and self-recovery based on independent component analysis

Abstract

The digital image watermarking field addresses the problem of digital image authentication and integrity. In this paper we propose a novel color image watermarking scheme based on image self-embedding and self-recovery techniques. The main idea of this algorithm is to embed a reduced content of the original image to itself, in order to be able to partially recover the deleted features from the watermarked image. Separately, the red and blue color channels are embedded, respectively in the wavelet domain by a compressed version of the original image, and in the spatial domain by binary encoded sequences generated from the original image. This allowed us, in detection stage, to prove the ownership, detect the altered blocks, and recover them. The detection and recovery bits extraction is computed using an ICA algorithm. The experimental results were satisfactory and show a high robustness against most common attacks as well as a reassuring rate of image recovery. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.