Quantization Watermarking Integrated in a Wavelet Compression System

There are several advantages to combine, at one end the image coding and watermark embedding scheme and at the other end, the image decoding and watermark extraction. In this paper, we present a blind watermarking approach based on quantization index modulation, incorporated in low bit rates wavelet image coder. To encode the binary message, the watermark is placed in the transformed image prior to the uniform quantization used in the compression algorithm. We also show that, by re-using the coding wavelet domain for watermark, the proposed watermarking scheme exhibits a high robustness with respect to compression attacks.