Content-based watermarking robust to low bit rate JPEG compression

A new robust watermarking method based on a blocking effect prediction model is presented. The proposed scheme embeds a watermark into a host image by taking into account the blocking effect that may result from block-based compression methods. The auspicious regions for embedding the watermark are derived from a distortion visibility map computed in the spatial domain. The main advantage of our approach is that regions affected by blocking effect are predicted before compression so as to prevent the watermark from being removed due to involuntary or malicious compression attacks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a good invisibility and robustness against some common signal processing attacks, especially to JPEG compression.