A WATERMARKING ALGORITHM BASED ON PERMUTATION AND 2-D BARCODE

This letter presents a method for digital image watermarking for copyright protection. This technique produces a watermarked image that closely retains the quality of the original host image while concurrently surviving various image processing operations such as lowpass/highpass filtering, lossy JPEG compression, and cropping. This image watermarking algorithm takes full advantage of permutation and 2-D barcode (PDF417). The actual watermark embedding in spatial domain is followed using permutated image for improving the resistance to image cropping. Much higher watermark robustness is obtainable via a simple forward error correction technique, which is the main feature of PDF417 codes. Additional features of this technique include the easy determination of the existence of the watermark and that the watermark verification procedure does not need the original host image. The experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness.