Localized image watermarking in spatial domain resistant to geometric attacks

Watermark robustness to geometric attacks is still a challenging research field. In this paper, a novel robust image watermarking scheme is proposed for resisting such attacks. Watermark synchronization is first achieved by local invariant regions which can be generated using scale normalization and image feature points. The watermark is embedded into all the local regions repeatedly in spatial domain. During embedding, each circular region is first divided into homocentric cirque regions. Then the watermark bits are embedded by quantizing each cirque region into an “odd” or “even” region using odd–even quantization. In the decoder, an odd–even detector (OED) is designed to extract the watermark from the distorted image directly. Localized embedding achieves good invisibility and repeated insertion enhances watermark robustness. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust to both geometric attacks and traditional signal processing attacks.