Robust digital watermarking for wavelet-based compression

A digital watermark is an undetectable mark placed on a host media. There are various applications for digital watermarks which include authentication, finger printing and digital rights enforcement. This implies that the watermark should be tolerant to image processing and lossy compression type of operations. Most standard watermarking techniques do not survive wavelet based compression and may also not be compatible with the scalability feature of wavelet based compression. We present a novel digital watermarking scheme which can successfully withstand wavelet based compression, as well as standard watermark attacks. Our technique is designed to work along side the SNR scalable transmission feature provided with most wavelet compression suites so that the watermark may be authenticated at any level of SNR transmission. Experimental results show that our proposed watermarking method performs better than existing techniques when the host data is compressed using wavelet transforms.