Significant Pixel Watermarking Using Human Visual System Model in Wavelet Domain

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for robust image watermarking by inserting a single copy of the watermark. Usually, robustness is achieved by embedding multiple copies of the watermark.The proposed method locates and watermarks ‘significant pixels’ of the image in the wavelet domain. Here, the amount of distortion at every pixel is kept within the threshold of perception by adopting ideas from Human Visual System (HVS) model. The robustness of the proposed method was verified under six different attacks. To verify the advantage of selecting the significant pixels over the highest absolute coefficients, simulations were performed under both cases with quantization of pixels as per HVS model. Simulation results show the advantage of selecting the ‘significant pixels’ for watermarking gray images as well as color images.