Robust watermark detection based on a new spatially weighted total variation based image prior

In this paper we propose a class of watermark detectors based on Total Variation (TV). A new image prior that uses a spatially weighted version of TV that captures local image properties is introduced for this problem. The resulting detector is compared to previously reported similar detectors and other state-of-the-art detectors for this problem. The proposed detector compares favorably with them both in terms of sensitivity when the watermark is very weak and in terms of robustness against common watermark attacks.