Robust Image Watermarking Against Crop and Rotation Attacks for Public Communication Networks

In public communication networks such as the internet, users can easily share and access multimedia products such as images, videos, and audios. Copyright protection is a vital issue to prove the ownership of products in these networks. Consequently, digital watermarking that hide invisible watermark or logo plays a significant role in overcoming copyright issue. However, any person has access to multimedia products can simply use these products. Also, there are professional attackers can remove the watermark or logo without loss the visibility of the multimedia product and claim their ownership for the digital products. This study proposes an image watermarking model that only allows authorized users to use the watermarked image. This model is robust against crop and rotation attacks. It is based on the proposed embedding method that we named a "concentric rectangles", which embeds data in rectangles starting from the center toward outer boundary to overcome the crop and rotation attacks. The resulted watermarked image is distorted in such a way to be recognized by any user, but only the authorized one can obtain a high quality of the watermarked image. The experimental results of the proposed model show that the embedding capacity can reach up to 25% from the size of the host image with watermarked image quality above 40 dB in terms of peak signal to noise rotation (PSNR). Furthermore, the proposed model is fully retrieval for the watermark image (logo) and the logo still retrieved a with a recognized vision until 10 dB of signal to noise ratio of noise adding.