Yu-Xin Liu

Aiming at the problem that the robustness, visibility, and transparency of the existing visible watermarking technologies are difficult to achieve a balance, this paper proposes an adaptive embedding method for visible watermarking. Firstly, the salient region of the host image is detected based on superpixel detection. Secondly, the flat region with relatively low complexity is selected as the embedding region in the nonsalient region of the host image. Then, the watermarking strength is adaptively calculated by considering the gray distribution and image texture complexity of the embedding region. Finally, the visible watermark image is adaptively embedded into the host image with slight adjustment by just noticeable difference (JND) coefficient. The experimental results show that our proposed method improves the robustness of visible watermarking technology and greatly reduces the risk of malicious removal of visible watermark image. Meanwhile, a good balance between the visibility and transparency of the visible watermark image is achieved, which has the advantages of high security and ideal visual effect.

Visible watermarking is one of the most direct and effective copyright protection methods for digital images and videos, but it faces the problems of easy detection of watermarking location and watermarking removal attacks. It requires that the visible watermarking not only can not affect visual quality of original digital products but also can resist accidental editing and malicious attacks. In this paper, an adaptive region selection method for visible watermark embedding is proposed. First, an improved region selection method based on the model of saliency-based visual attention (MSVA) is used to more accurately distinguish salient and non-salient regions of host image; then, the non-salient regions of image are divided into sub-blocks to calculate texture complexity respectively; finally, a moderate image block is selected as the embedding region of visible watermark image according to the distribution of image texture complexity. The experimental results show that the proposed method can identify saliency regions more accurately, thus ensuring that the important contents of host image will not be occluded. The adaptive selection of embedding region based on image complexity not only ensures the recognizability and aesthetics of visible watermark embedding effect but also takes into account the security of watermark embedding, and especially reduces the risk of batch removal attacks.

EPJ Web of Conferences, open-access proceedings in physics and related sciences