Object-based multiresolution watermarking of images and video

This paper proposes a new approach to digital watermarking of image and video objects with arbitrary regions of support (AROS) based on the 2D and 3D shape adaptive wavelet transforms. The hierarchical nature of the wavelet representation of objects allows detection of the digital watermark at various resolutions. We show that, when subjected to image/video compression, the corresponding watermark of objects can still be correctly identified at each resolution (excluding the lowest one) in the wavelet domain. Such a multiresolution watermarking scheme for objects has computational advantage, especially for the video case. Potential applications of our proposed scheme include watermark-based object searching and indexing.