Digital Image Watermarking for Arbitrarily Shaped Objects Based On SA-DWT

Many image watermarking schemes have been proposed in recent years, but they usually involve embedding a watermark to the entire image without considering only a particular object in the image, which the image owner may be interested in. This paper proposes a watermarking scheme that can embed a watermark to an arbitrarily shaped object in an image. Before embedding, the image owner specifies an object of arbitrary shape that is of a concern to him. Then the object is transformed into the wavelet domain using in place lifting shape adaptive DWT(SADWT) and a watermark is embedded by modifying the wavelet coefficients. In order to make the watermark robust and transparent, the watermark is embedded in the average of wavelet blocks using the visual model based on the human visual system. Wavelet coefficients n least significant bits (LSBs) are adjusted in concert with the average. Simulation results shows that the proposed watermarking scheme is perceptually invisible and robust against many attacks such as lossy compression (e.g. JPEG, JPEG2000), scaling, adding noise, filtering, etc.