A Systematic Redundancy Approach in Watermarking Using Sudoku

Digital watermarking is one of the most important techniques employed to protect digital contents. Copyright information embedded in the digital contents may become undetectable due to compression and additive noise attacks introduced into a watermarked image. A general strategy to overcome such attacks is to embed redundant watermarking to improve the survivability of the watermark. However, current approaches in redundant watermarking is generally not designed in a systematic way. In this paper, a systematic redundancy approach in watermarking using Sudoku is proposed. The approach is based on the property of Sudoku's permutation that provide tightly related, redundant copies of watermark pieces discretely distributed to different hiding planes. Using the classic 9X9 Sudoku puzzle, the proposed approach has been implemented and tested with Gaussian, compression, poisson, speckle, low pass filter, high pass filter and contrast attacks using standard images. The result indicates sustained survivability of the watermark under common attacks.