Incorporating Watson´s perceptual model into patchwork watermarking for digital images

This paper presents a modified patchwork watermarking scheme for digital images by incorporating the Watson´s perceptual model into the watermarking process. Watermarking occurs in the DCT domain. Watson´s perceptual model provides a measure of distortions that each DCT coefficient can resist based on the human visual system (HVS). Perceptual information is incorporated into the watermarking scheme by minimizing the Watson´s distance between the host image and watermarked image using quadratic programming. Compared with patchwork schemes which do not consider perceptual models, experiments indicate that the proposed method has increased robustness and fidelity of the watermarking system.