Image Watermarking with Unequal Error Protection Capability

We propose a novel image watermarking scheme capable of providing unequal protection levels to different regions in the image. In the scheme, we firstly divide the image into high protection region, low protection region and non-protection region, and then use unequal error protection (UEP) code to encode the bits generated by high and low protection regions simultaneously and form the watermark bits to embed in the non-protection region. On the receiver side, the extracted bits with UEP capability can recover the high protection region more correctly than the low protection region.