• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.39-52
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• 1999

In this paper we propose a new watermarking technique for copyright protection of images. The proposed technique is based on a spatial masking method with a spatial scale parameter. In general it becomes more robust against various attacks but with some degradations on the image quality as the amplitude of the watermark increases. On the other hand it becomes perceptually more invisible but more vulnerable to various attacks as the amplitude of the watermark decreases. Thus it is quite complex to decide the compromise between the robustness of watermark and its visibility. We note that watermarking using the spread spectrum is not robust enought. That is there may be some areas in the image that are tolerable to strong watermark signals. However large smooth areas may not be strong enough. Thus in order to enhance the invisibility of watermarked image for those areas the spatial masking characteristics of the HVS(Human Visual System) should be exploited. That is for texture regions the magnitude of the watermark can be large whereas for those smooth regions the magnitude of the watermark can be small. As a result the proposed watermarking algorithm is intend to satisfy both the robustness of watermark and the quality of the image. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust to image deformations(such as compression adding noise image scaling clipping and collusion attack).