Robustness analysis of blind watermarking for quality scalable image compression

Robustness analysis of a blind wavelet based ranked-ordered watermarking scheme against quality scalable image compression is presented in this paper. The analysis considers a general wavelet-based compression scheme by modeling the bit-plane discarding, used in achieving quality scalability in JPEG2000. In this work we aim to improve the robustness by proposing the optimum modification for the selected coefficients in order to retain the watermark information. A relationship is established between the watermark detection algorithm and the number of bit planes discarded and this knowledge is used during the embedding procedure. The proposed model assumes the same embedding and compression wavelet kernel. The experimental results verify the proposed model and demonstrate improved performance in robustness to quality scalable compression in JPEG2000.