Image Watermarking Method Satisfying IHC by Using PEG LDPC Code

Abstract

We propose a digital image watermarking method satisfying information hiding criteria (IHC) for robustness against JPEG compression, cropping, scaling, and rotation. When a stego-image is cropped, the marking positions of watermarks are unclear. To detect the position in a cropped stego-image, a marker or synchronization code is embedded with the watermarks in a lattice pattern. Attacks by JPEG compression, scaling, and rotation cause errors in extracted watermarks. Against such errors, the same watermarks are repeatedly embedded in several areas. The number of errors in the extracted watermarks can be reduced by using a weighted majority voting (WMV) algorithm. To correct residual errors in output of the WMV algorithm, we use a high-performance error-correcting code: a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code constructed by progressive edge-growth (PEG). In computer simulations using the IHC ver. 4 the proposed method could a bit error rate of 0, the average PSNR was 41.136 dB, and the computational time for synchronization recovery was less than 10 seconds. The proposed method can thus provide high image quality and fast synchronization recovery.