Performance of reversible digital image watermarking under error-prone data communication: a simulation-based study

Reversible digital watermarking techniques enable the recovery of the original `cover image` from a watermarked image in a distortion-free way. Reversible watermarking techniques find application in military and medical imagery, where integrity of the cover image is of utmost importance. However, in practice, many military data transmissions occur over communication channels whose noise levels are so high that the receiving system is unable to correct all errors in the received data. In such a case, the authors are bound to get non-zero distortion in the recovered cover image as well as the extracted watermark, in spite of using reversible watermarking techniques. In this study, they investigate the effect of high data error rates on different state-of-the-art reversible watermarking algorithms. Their simulation results help to choose the most suitable reversible watermarking scheme, depending on whether the distortion of the retrieved cover image or the distortion of the retrieved watermark is the primary concern.