A visible watermarking mechanism using a statistic approach

Relative to the researches on invisible digital watermarking, those on visible digital watermarking are less attractive. This situation may be caused by the fact that the visible watermark will reduce the commercial value of the stego-information. However, this fact, on the contrary, can increase the flexibility and usability of the stego-information because the cover-information is well seen but it is difficult or troublesome to remove the visible watermark. We give the features that a visible watermarking mechanism should fulfill and also design a mechanism to satisfy these features. From the experimental results, the distributions of those gray-value histograms of stego-images have less variances comparing to those of cover-images. Thus, it seems that to remove or damage this visible watermark is hard to achieve or it will take a great deal of effort to recover the cover-information