Novel image watermarking scheme based on ICA

In this paper, a novel image watermarking scheme based on independent component analysis (ICA) is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the original image is sub-sampled firstly to obtain four sub-images, and the features of the original image are extracted by performing ICA to these sub-images, and then the feature, which has the largest variance, is selected out to be watermarked on its block DCT coefficients. During the embedding, human visual system (HVS) is used to determine which regions should be watermarked in order to balance the imperceptibility and the robustness. Experiments show that the watermark can be extracted blindly, and it is robust to common watermark attack and image processing, such as JPEG compression, noising, scaling, filtering, histogram equalization, and so on.