Visible-Imperceptible Image Watermarking based on Reversible Data Hiding with Contrast Enhancement

Currently the use and production of multimedia data such as digital images have increased due to its wide use within smart devices and open networks. Although this has some advantages, it has generated several issues related to the infraction of intellectual property. Digital image watermarking is a promissory solution to solve these issues. Considering the need to develop mechanisms to improve the information security as well as protect the intellectual property of the digital images, in this paper we propose a novel visible-imperceptible watermarking based on reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement. In this way, a watermark logo is embedded in the spatial domain of the original image imperceptibly, so that the logo is revealed applying reversible data hiding increasing the contrast of the watermarked image and the same time concealing a great amount of data bits, which are extracted and the watermarked image restored to its original conditions using the reversible functionality. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. A performance comparison with the current state-of-the-art is provided.