Progressive Watermarking for Images with Regions of Interest

In this paper, we propose a binary value based progressive image watermarking approach for digital right protection. The proposed method embed most watermark information into region of interest(ROI) of an image. Therefore, a client on Internet can decode the watermark while receiving the image, moreover, most watermark information would be decoded while the ROI of the image is received. In order to increase information density embedded in ROI, a transform similar to the DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) is applied on a binary watermark, and embed the transformed coefficients in appropriate region of the image. On the other hand, while extracting watermark, it is necessary to determine the ROI of the image and extract the transformed watermark coefficients embedded. The last step for extracting watermark is collocating all parameters to extract the original watermark by using a inverse transform similar to IDWT (Inverse DWT). With the method proposed, most potion of watermark could be extracted even when only ROIs are available. Experiment results show that the proposed watermarking scheme has not only excellent robustness and imperceptibility, but also early detection capability to deal with JPEG2000 images.