Robust VQ-based digital watermarking for memoryless binary symmetric channel

Abstract

Vector quantization (VQ) has been distinguished for its high compression rate in lossy data compression applications. And VQ-based watermarking plays a newly developed branch in digital watermarking research fields. In this paper, we propose optimized schemes for VQ-based image watermarking. We overcome the VQ index assignment problem with genetic algorithm, which is suitable for transmitting the watermarked image over noisy channels. We obtain better robustness of the watermarking algorithm against the effects caused by channel noise in our simulations after inspecting the results from several test images. In addition, to compare with existing schemes in literature, the watermarked image quality in our scheme has approximately the same quality, with better performance in robustness, to the schemes proposed by other researchers. This also proves the effectiveness of our proposed schemes in VQ-based image watermarking for copyright protection.