Region-Based Watermarking for Images

There is a spate of research activities investigating digital image watermarking schemes in an effort to control the problem of illegal proliferation of creative digital data across the Internet. Several schemes, with their merits and demerits, have been proposed to date. However, many of them rely on the presentation of a test image in an appropriate format before the detection can proceed. In most cases this is achieved through some form of pre-processing. This paper proposes a technique, using image region segmentation, which alleviates many of the problems associated with pre-processing and thus allowing the detection process to be more independent as well as reducing the need for human intervention.