Print-and-scan resilient watermarking through polarizing DCT coefficients

Digital watermarking techniques have been used to assert the ownerships of digital images. That is, the ownership information is embedded to an image as a watermark such that the owner of the image could be identified. However, there are also many attacks trying to break or remove the embedded watermark. Therefore, the watermark should be very robust against various kinds of attacks. Among them, the print-and-scan (PS) attack is very challenging because it not only alters the pixel values but also changes the positions of the original pixels. In this paper, we propose a watermarking system operating in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. The polarities of the DCT coefficients are modified for watermark embedding. This is done by considering the properties of DCT coefficients under the PS attack. The proposed system is able to maintain the image quality after watermarking and the embedded watermark is very robust against the PS attack as well.