Histogram shape-based robust image watermarking method

Developing a watermarking method that is robust to cropping attack and random bending attacks (RBAs) is a challenging task in image watermarking. In this paper, we propose a histogram-based image watermarking method to tackle with both cropping attack and RBAs. In this method first the gray levels are divided into groups. Secondly the groups for watermark embedding are selected according to the number of pixels in them, which makes this method fully based on the histogram shape of the original image and adaptive to different images. Then the watermark bits are embedded by modifying the histogram of the selected groups. Since histogram shape is insensitive to cropping and independent from pixel positions, the proposed method is robust to cropping attack and RBAs. Besides, it also has high robustness against other common attacks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2014 IEEE.