Novel ROI Watermarking Scheme Combined with the Behavior of Primary Visual Cortex

If obvious objects in an image are deleted, the image would be meaningless. The protection of the image contents is imminence. A novel image watermarking scheme combined with the behavior of primary visual cortex is proposed. The Berkeley wavelet transform shares many characteristics with the receptive fields of neurons in mammalian primary visual cortex (V1). The watermark is embedded into the region-of-interest (ROI) position of an image. Independent component analysis (ICA) is adapted to the watermark extraction procedure and the original image is not necessary. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking technique successfully locates ROI position automatically, has a good vision performance and robustness against some attacks as JPEG compress, noises, and little rotation and scale, luminance and contrast enhancement and low pass filtering. More importantly, the proposed scheme can extract the watermarks with high quality even if majority background of an original image is removed.