A Halftoning - Based Multipurpose Image Watermarking with Recovery Capability

Nowadays digital watermarking has become an important technique, because using computational tools, digital contents can be copied and/or modified easily. At the beginning, the digital watermarking has been used for either copyright protection purpose or content authentication purpose. However, in many situations both purposes (copyright protection and content authentication) are required to be satisfied at same time. The watermarking scheme that satisfies both purposes is called multipurpose watermarking scheme. In this paper, a novel multipurpose watermarking scheme is proposed, in which a selfembedding technique based on halftoning is used for content authentication and recovery purpose, and a binary pattern is embedded into the halftone image using quantization-based embedding method for copyright protection purpose. Experimental results show favorable performance of the proposed algorithm. Keywords— Halftoning, Multipurpose watermarking, Quantization method, Self-embedding.