A novel reversible robust watermarking algorithm based on chaotic system

Reversible watermarking can be applied to the protection for important digital media, such as medical and military image. it allows the watermark to be extracted and the original image to be restored completely, but reversible watermarking with stronger robustness is seldom discussed in existing literature. In this paper, a novel reversible watermarking algorithm based on chaotic system is proposed: chaotic system is not only used to search space of reversibility of the scheme, but also used to randomly select the position of watermarking embedding. Consequently, the proposed scheme achieves larger threshold space of reversibility and better performance of security. For some specific thresholds, the proposed algorithm is not only reversible, but also has stronger robustness against image compression. The experimental results show that the ergodicity and sensitivity to initial values of chaotic system play an important role in reversible watermarking algorithm, and the proposed scheme can achieve balance between reversibility and robustness with the help of chaotic system. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.