Image Feature-Based Watermarking

This paper carries out a comparative study of watermarking schemes that are based on the visual features of the cover media. More specifically, the watermark is least significant bit (LSB)-embedded into the cover media, utilizing one of the following: a) all the cover image pixels, b) pixels that depict a corner in the cover image, c) pixels that depict an edge in the cover image, d) pixels that depict a certain saliency in the cover image. The stego media is also subjected to a number of statistical and geometrical attacks and performance evaluation is carried out utilizing a number of metrics. The comparative study shows that LSB embedding in edge or corner detected pixels allows for the best robustness against Salt & Pepper attacks. While LSB embedding in edge detected or image saliency detected pixels allows for the best robustness against image shearing attacks.