Digital Watermarking Robust Against JPEG Compression

Digital watermarking has been considered as an important technique to protect the copyright of digital content. For a digital watermarking method to be effective, it is essential that a watermark embedded in a still or moving image resists against various attacks ranging from compression, filtering to cropping. As JPEG is a dominant still image compression standard for Internet applications, digital watermarking methods that are robust against the JPEG compression are especially useful. Most digital watermarking methods proposed so far work by modulating pixels/coefficients without considering the quality level of JPEG, which renders watermarks readily removable. In this paper, we propose a new method that actively uses the JPEG quality level as a parameter in embedding a watermark into an image. A useful feature of the new method is that the watermark can be extracted even when the image is compressed using JPEG.