Publication Date

9-1-2021

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Electronics (Switzerland)

Volume

10

Issue

18

DOI

10.3390/electronics10182186

Abstract

In a practical watermark scenario, watermarks are used to provide auxiliary information; in this way, an analogous digital approach called unseen–visible watermark has been introduced to deliver auxiliary information. In this algorithm, the embedding stage takes advantage of the visible and invisible watermarking to embed an owner logotype or barcodes as watermarks; in the exhibition stage, the equipped functions of the display devices are used to reveal the watermark to the naked eyes, eliminating any watermark exhibition algorithm. In this paper, a watermark complement strategy for unseen–visible watermarking is proposed to improve the embedding stage, reducing the histogram distortion and the visual degradation of the watermarked image. The presented algorithm exhibits the following contributions: first, the algorithm can be applied to any class of images with large smooth regions of low or high intensity; second, a watermark complement strategy is introduced to reduce the visual degradation and histogram distortion of the watermarked image; and third, an embedding error measurement is proposed. Evaluation results show that the proposed strategy has high performance in comparison with other algorithms, providing a high visual quality of the exhibited watermark and preserving its robustness in terms of readability and imperceptibility against geometric and processing attacks.

Funding Sponsor

Instituto Politécnico Nacional

Keywords

Histogram distortion, Imperceptible–visible watermarking, Invisible–visible watermarking, QR code, Unseen–visible watermarking, Visual degradation, Watermark complement strategy

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Electrical Engineering

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