Robust image watermarking using sample area quantization

Digital watermarking is a way to protect the intellectual property of digital media. Among different algorithms, Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) is one of the popular methods in designing a watermark system. In this paper, a sample area quantization method is proposed for robust watermarking of digital images. First, the samples of the host signal form a polygon and low frequency wavelet coefficients of the carrier image is considered as the host sample. A watermark digit is embedded by quantizing the area of the polygon. Then, in order to minimize the distortion, the watermarked samples are obtained as close as possible to the host samples by solving an optimization problem while maintaining the quantized area at its fixed value. The optimization problem is solved using the gradient descend method. Finally, a maximum likelihood detector is designed to extract the watermark digits, assuming a Gaussian distribution for the host signal samples. The performance of the proposed method is theoretically obtained in terms of error probability in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise. Theoretical results are verified using simulation with artificial signals. The proposed method is compared to the state-of-the-art method under different attacks including: noise addition, JPEG compression, filtering, and geometrical attacks. The results confirm that the proposed method outperforms the other ones in terms of error probability against different attacks. The results also show that in the trade-off between robustness, distortion and capacity, by decreasing capacity the two other factors could be improved simultaneously.