Difference angle quantization index modulation scheme for image watermarking

In this paper, we propose a new angle quantization index modulation (AQIM) method, called the difference AQIM (DAQIM) method. The proposed method aims to improve the watermarking performance against gain attacks. Unlike the original AQIM method (Ourique et al., Angle QIM: a novel watermark embedding scheme robust against amplitude scaling distortions, in: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, vol. 2, 2005, pp. 797-800), the DAQIM method quantizes the difference of the two angles instead of the angles themselves. The main advantage of the DAQIM method is to disperse the interference to the watermark signal from one angle to more angles. Thus, the watermark has a higher ability to resist attacks. We perform a theoretical analysis of the document-to-watermark ratio (DWR) based on our proposed method. We show that our proposed method can obtain a lower embedding distortion compared to the AQIM and the gradient direction watermarking (GDWM) (Nezhadarya et al., IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur., 6(4), 2011,1200-1213), methods under the same robustness and payload conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms common existing methods in terms of the robustness against various attacks such as the JPEG quantization noise, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), cropping effect and mean filtering. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.