Robust image watermarking based on multiband wavelets and empirical mode decomposition

In this paper, we propose a blind image watermarking algorithm based on the multiband wavelet transformation and the empirical mode decomposition. Unlike the watermark algorithms based on the traditional two-band wavelet transform, where the watermark bits are embedded directly on the wavelet coefficients, in the proposed scheme, we embed the watermark bits in the mean trend of some middle-frequency subimages; in the wavelet domain. We further select appropriate dilation factor and filters in the multiband wavelet transform to achieve better performance in terms of perceptually invisibility and the robustness of the watermark. The experimental results show that the proposed blind watermarking scheme is robust against JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise, median filtering, and ConvFilter attacks. The comparison analysis demonstrate that our scheme has better performance than the watermarking schemes reported recently.