Progressive image watermarking

Progressive transmission of images is very useful in many applications, especially in image transmission over the Internet. To view an image, people would want to see part of the image while the image transmission is in progress, rather than having to wait until the end of the image transmission. On the other hand, the ease of transmission and copying of images creates the need to use digital watermarking to embed the copyright information seamlessly into the media. We propose a progressive image watermarking scheme. In this scheme, the watermark is embedded in such a way that we can retrieve part of it even when the watermarked image is still being transmitted. As transmission progresses, the retrieved watermark has a decreasing bit error rate. Our proposed methods not only transmit the watermarked image progressively, but also intelligently select watermark embedding locations robust to various attacks