Blind image data hiding based on self reference

For most watermark applications, it is often desired to retrieve the embedded information without access to the host data, which is a so-called blind watermarking technique. Most of the available blind watermarking schemes either suffer significantly from host data interference or require expense of storage. Therefore, a simple and effective blind watermarking scheme is expected. In this paper, we present a kind of blind watermarking technique, which is based on relative modulation of the pixel value/DCT coefficient value by referring to its estimated one. This technique entirely eliminates the effect of host data interference, thus having considerable advantage over previous counterpart watermarking schemes. Especially, our DCT AC-estimation-based technique reveals extraordinary robustness against numerical attacks, such as noise addition, filtering and JPEG compression. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.