Application of transmit diversity for improved robust watermarking

Many common multimedia signal processing, including cropping, filtering, and perceptual coding, make watermark signal fading-like modification. A scheme that applies transmit diversity technique to improve robustness of digital watermarking is presented. First, the scheme decomposes the original image using wavelet pyramid algorithm and chooses the middle-frequency band for transmission channel that the watermark will be embedded into. Then the watermark is pseudo-randomly permuted. The scheme makes use of space-time coding and differential detection technique to embed and extract watermark. The extracting process has access to neither the original image nor channel state information. Experimental results demonstrate that the scheme improves the performance of robust watermarking.