Watermarking With Flexible Self-Recovery Quality Based on Compressive Sensing and Compositive Reconstruction

This paper proposes a novel watermarking scheme with flexible self-recovery quality. The embedded watermark data for content recovery are calculated from the original discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of host image and do not contain any additional redundancy. When a part of a watermarked image is tampered, the watermark data in the area without any modification still can be extracted. If the amount of extracted data is large, we can reconstruct the original coefficients in the tampered area according to the constraints given by the extracted data. Otherwise, we may employ a compressive sensing technique to retrieve the coefficients by exploiting the sparseness in the DCT domain. This way, all the extracted watermark data contribute to the content recovery. The smaller the tampered area, the more available watermark data will result in a better quality of recovered content. It is also shown that the proposed scheme outperforms previous techniques in general.