Secure reversible visible image watermarking with authentication

This paper proposes a secure reversible visible watermarking approach. The proposed pixel mapping function superposes a binary watermark image on a host image to create an intermediate visible watermarked image. Meanwhile, an almost inverse function generates the recovery data for restoring the original pixels. To prevent unauthorized users from approximating the original pixels in the watermarked region, this method adds an integer sequence in the intermediate watermarked image. The sequence is composed of integers generated by two random variables having normal distributions with zero means and distinct variances. The variances facilitate a trade-off between the watermark transparency and the noise generated by unauthorized users. The proposed method also uses Lagrange multipliers to find the optimized variances for the trade-off. Finally, this method uses reversible data embedding to embed the recovery data and hash value for reversibility and authentication, respectively. Experimental results show the watermark visibility for test images along with the watermark transparency for different variances. Using the optimized variances, the watermarked image is at the balance between the watermark transparency and the unauthorized-user-generating noise. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.