A Digital Image Watermarking Using Region Segmentation

This paper takes the region segmentation in image processing and the semantic importance in an image analysis into consideration for digital image watermarking. A semantic importance for an object region, which is segmented by specific features, is determined according to the contents of the region. In this paper, face images are the targets of watermarking for their increasing importance, the use of frequency and strong necessity of protection. A face region is detected and segmented as an object region and encoded watermark information is embedded into the region. Employing a masking and filtering method, experiments are carried out and the results show the usefulness of the proposed method even when there are high compression and a synthesis as a case of copyright infringement.