Normalized Correlation-Based Quantization Modulation for Robust Watermarking

A novel quantization watermarking method is presented in this paper, which is developed following the established feature modulation watermarking model. In this method, a feature signal is obtained by computing the normalized correlation (NC) between the host signal and a random signal. Information modulation is carried out on the generated NC by selecting a codeword from the codebook associated with the embedded information. In a simple case, the structured codebooks are designed using uniform quantizers for modulation. The watermarked signal is produced to provide the modulated NC in the sense of minimizing the embedding distortion. The performance of the NC-based quantization modulation (NCQM) is analytically investigated, in terms of the embedding distortion and the decoding error probability in the presence of valumetric scaling and additive noise attacks. Numerical simulations on artificial signals confirm the validity of our analyses and exhibit the performance advantage of NCQM over other modulation techniques. The proposed method is also simulated on real images by using the wavelet-based implementations, where the host signal is constructed by the detail coefficients of wavelet decomposition at the third level and transformed into the NC feature signal for the information modulation. Experimental results show that the proposed NCQM not only achieves the improved watermark imperceptibility and a higher embedding capacity in high-noise regimes, but also is more robust to a wide range of attacks, e. g., valumetric scaling, Gaussian filtering, additive noise, Gamma correction, and Gray-level transformations, as compared with the state-of-the-art watermarking methods.