Filter bank selection for the ownership verification of wavelet based digital image watermarking

Wavelet transform has been widely used in many signal processing applications. Advanced researches have intensively investigated the characteristics of wavelet filters, adaptive wavelet decomposition structure for coding optimization and different combination of mathematical operations for digital image watermarking implementations. Among these studies, there are researches shown that the combination of wavelet filters or filter bank decomposition structure can be implemented as the function of the keys for the watermarking. Even this property provides the flexibility for practical usage, the false alarm of the rightful ownership verification is essentially existed since the resolution requirement for the transformed coefficients can be less demanded than other applications like compression or encryption. Therefore, this study has investigated and discussed the issues and proposed a solution which utilizes the distinguishing index as the selection criterion for wavelet based digital image watermarking in order to increase the difficulty of guessing the right filter banks, in the mean time, to reduce the probability of the misjudgment.