Lossless visible watermarking based on adaptive circular shift operation for BTC-compressed images

Most existing BTC (Block Truncation Coding) based watermarking algorithms do not fully exploit visual perception of the host images. These schemes cannot obtain visual quality of stego-images and recover original images without distortion. To solve this issue, a new reversible visible watermarking scheme based on AMBTC (Absolute Moment Block Truncation Coding) domain is proposed. First, the proposed scheme uses adaptive pixel circular shift operation that adapts to local properties of the image to embed the visible watermark into two level (one-bit) nonparametric quantization levels of AMBTC according to the parity of the bit plane of AMBTC triple. The watermark signal can be extracted according to the parity of the Bit plane. The experimental results prove that the algorithm can achieve high visual quality of stego-images and recover original BTC-compressed image losslessly. Moreover, it is robust against common signal processing attacks. The visible watermarking algorithm can be applied to copyright of digital images in real-time environment because of the low time consumption due to the simplicity of AMBTC.