Joint Watermarking and Compression for Images in Transform Domain

Image watermarking, authentication and encryption have gained an increased importance during the last decade. This is due to the widespread use of visual media over the Internet and in several digital media applications. Several watermarking techniques have been proposed, some in spatial domain, and more recently in the transform/frequency domain and have been reported to be robust against different attacks, namely compression. It is also well known the importance and effectiveness of compression techniques to store transmit and retrieve visual information. However, the creation or development of a joint watermarking and compression framework for images has yet to be explored, where watermarking and compression could be pursued jointly on a trade-off manner. In other words, watermarking embedding/extraction can be performed on compressed domain data, while compression parameters could be used as watermarking keys. The primary focus of this paper is to explore this novel/unique idea. We propose a joint watermarking and compression (JWC) technique in the transform domain. This transform domain is based on the Natural Preserve Transform and can be utilized to achieve a balance between watermarking and compression for visual information. Watermarking performance is evaluated blindly for different compressed domain data scenarios, while compression performance is analyzed for other watermarking cases. Extensive simulation results that demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed joint watermarking and compression technique are presented.