Spatial Image Watermarking by Error-Correction Coding in Gray Codes

In this paper, error-correction coding (ECC) in Gray codes is considered and its performance in the protecting of spatial image watermarks against lossy data compression is demonstrated. For this purpose, the differences between bit patterns of two Gray codewords are analyzed in detail. On the basis of the properties, a method for encoding watermark bits in the Gray codewords that represent signal levels by a single-error-correcting (SEC) code is developed, which is referred to as the Gray-ECC method in this paper. The two codewords of the SEC code corresponding to respective watermark bits are determined so as to minimize the expected amount of distortion caused by the watermark embedding. The stochastic analyses show that an error-correcting capacity of the Gray-ECC method is superior to that of the ECC in natural binary codes for changes in signal codewords. Experiments of the Gray-ECC method were conducted on 8-bit monochrome images to evaluate both the features of watermarked images and the performance of robustness for image distortion resulting from the JPEG DCT-baseline coding scheme. The results demonstrate that, compared with a conventional averaging-based method, the Gray-ECC method yields watermarked images with less amount of signal distortion and also makes the watermark comparably robust for lossy data compression.