A new spatial perceptual mask for image watermarking

This paper develops a new mask in the spatial domain for image watermarking. The mask exploits the properties of human visual system with respect to background luminance, the edge and texture masking, which are expressed by certain image features. On the use of the mask, a new double domain watermarking framework is presented. The watermark is embedded into one transform domain, but perceptually shaped in the spatial domain. It allows us to use the features of double domains for embedding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mask has superior performance compared to existing spatial masking schemes, and further achieves the improved performance by incorporating the proposed watermarking framework.