A robust content based image watermarking using local invariant histogram

Desynchronization attack is known as one of the most difficult attacks to resist, which can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence causes incorrect watermark detection. Based on multi-scale SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) detector and local image histogram shape invariance, we propose a new content based image watermarking algorithm with good visual quality and reasonable resistance toward desynchronization attacks in this paper. Firstly, the stable image feature points are extracted from the original host by using multi-scale SIFT detector, and the local feature regions (LFRs) are constructed adaptively according to the feature scale theory. Then, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is performed on the LFR, and the local image histogram is extracted from a selected DFT amplitude range. Finally, the bins of the histogram are divided into many groups, and the digital watermark is embedded into LFR by reassigning the number of DFT amplitudes in bin groups. By binding the watermark with the geometrically invariant image features, the watermark detection can be done without synchronization error. Experimental results show that the proposed image watermarking is not only invisible and robust against common image processing operations such as sharpening, noise adding, and JPEG compression, but also robust against the desynchronization attacks such as rotation, translation, scaling, row or column removal, and cropping.