RST transforms resistant image watermarking based on centroid and sector-shaped partition

A novel digital watermarking scheme featuring centroid-based sectoring is proposed in this paper. To get higher robustness against geometric attacks, such as rotation, scaling, and translation (RST), a delicate synchronization mechanism was developed and incorporated into the proposed approach. During the process of watermark embedding, the original image was partitioned into sectors based on the image centroid. Synchronization information as well as the message bits is then embedded into these sectors. With the help of the centroid-based sectoring and synchronization information, the proposed approach is capable of restoring the correct sectoring even if it has experienced severe geometric distortion. This attribute ensures the correct recovery of embedded watermarks and contributes to the robustness of the proposed scheme. A series of experiments have been conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme possesses good robustness against RST attacks and considerable robustness against other common image processing attacks.