An image watermarking method integrating with JPEG-2000 still image compression standard

In this paper, a new digital watermarking method, integrating with the state-of-the-art image compression standard--JPEG 2000, is developed. Unlike most proposed watermarking schemes, which embed watermarks in the wavelet domain, a binary watermark is embedded in the code stream, which is the output of entropy (tier 2) coding. To reduce the image distortion introduced by the embedded watermark, visual compensation is applied. To improve the robustness of the watermark, a protection region, characterized by each subband, is determined according to human visual system (HVS). The experimental results show that, by selecting the subband and bit-plane carefully, the proposed watermarking scheme exhibits a high robustness to normal image processing.