Rotation invariant watermark embedding based on scale-adapted characteristic regions

Rotation invariance is one of the most challenging issues in robust image watermarking. This paper presents two rotation invariant watermark embedding schemes in the non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain based on the scale-adapted local regions. Watermark synchronization is achieved using the scale-space feature point based local characteristic regions. The first method embeds a binary watermark sequence by partitioning the local regions in a rotation invariant pattern. The second method embeds a binary watermark image in a content based manner, and the watermark signal is adaptive to the orientation of the image. Both methods achieve rotation invariant embedding by only using the rotation normalizing angle, thus no interpolation operation is performed. Extensive simulation results and comparisons show that the proposed schemes can efficiently resist both signal processing attacks and geometric attacks.