Geometric attack resistant watermarking in wavelet transform domain

In this paper, we propose an autocorrelation function (ACF) based watermarking scheme in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain. Conventional ACF-based watermarking embeds a watermark in the spatial domain due to its detection mechanism.We show that the autocorrelation (AC) peaks, which play an important role in estimating the applied geometric attacks in ACF-based watermarking, can also be extracted by embedding the watermark in the DWT domain. In the proposed scheme, a periodic watermark is embedded in the DWT domain by considering the AC peak strength and noise visibility. The proposed scheme also deals efficiently with the image shift problem in the detection process by using the undecimated DWT. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme yields stronger AC peaks than the spatial domain scheme does and, as a result, shows improved robustness against combined geometric-removal.