More than ever, the growing amount of exchanged digital content calls for efficient and practical techniques to protect intellectual property rights. During the past two decades, watermarking techniques have been proposed to embed and detect information within these contents, with four key requirements at hand: robustness, security, capacity, and invisibility. So far, researchers mostly focused on the first three, but seldom addressed the invisibility from a perceptual perspective and instead mostly relied on objective quality metrics. In this paper, a novel DFT watermarking scheme featuring perceptually optimal visibility versus robustness is proposed. The watermark, a noise-like square patch of coefficients, is embedded by substitution within the Fourier domain; the amplitude component adjusts the watermark strength, and the phase component holds the information. A perceptual model of the human visual system (HVS) based on the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and a local contrast pooling is used to determine the optimal strength at which the mark reaches the visibility threshold. A novel blind detection method is proposed to assess the presence of the watermark. The proposed approach exhibits high robustness to various kinds of attacks, including geometrical distortions. Experimental results show that the robustness of the proposed method is globally slightly better than state-of-the-art. A comparative study was conducted at the visibility threshold (from subjective data) and showed that the obtained performances are more stable across various kinds of content.

The present work explores the use of a specific method, called non linear hybrid watermarking to watermark High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. The non linear hybrid technique combines both additive and multiplicative watermark embedding and is based on a square root embedding equation. We evaluate the robustness and objective quality of HDR tone mapped watermarked images on two different HDR databases. The experimentations show that the watermark is imperceptible and successfully survives tone mapping attack.

The Hyper-Cube watermarking has shown a high potential for high-rate robust watermarking. In this paper, we carry on the study and the evaluation of this quantization-based approach. We especially focus on the use of a Trellis Coded Quantization (TCQ) and its impact on the Hyper-Cube performances. First, we recall the TCQ functioning principle and we propose adapted quantizers. Second, we analyze the integration of the TCQ module in a cascade of two coders (resp. two decoders). Finally, we experimentally compare the proposed approach with the state-of-the-art of high-rate watermarking schemes. The obtained results show that our Multi-Hyper-Cube scheme always provides good average performances.