Abstract—Spread Spectrum (SS) is one of the most common techniques used in watermarking systems due to its security, robustness, imperceptibility and information extracting without the host data. However, this technique suffers the interference between the host data and the watermark, which degrades significantly the performance of watermarking system. In the other hand, most existing spread spectrum-based image watermarking methods are non-blind and implemented for single channel images with one information bit. Therefore, this paper presents a new cooperative spread spectrum based blind watermarking technique, which can apply to not only single channel images but also multi-channel images or set of images. In this technique, the same information is embedded into multiple channels and a global linear cooperative decision is used to exploit the collaboration among the local correlation detectors. Moreover, improved method is also mentioned to eliminate the interference between the host images and the watermarks. Especially, the Karhunen Loeve Transform (KLT) is exploited to enhance the performance of the proposed cooperative watermarking system. Furthermore, extensive methods for multi-bit watermarking are also discussed. Based on theoretical analysis, the optimal solutions of the watermark, watermark strength coefficients, weighting coefficients, threshold, and probability error are established. Experimental results are simulated with ideal channel (without attack) as well as additive Gaussian channel to verify theoretical analysis. 
 

Index Terms—robust blind image watermarking, spread spectrum, correlation, Karhunen Loeve Transform

 

Cite: Tuan Nguyen-Thanh and Thuong Le-Tien, "Study on Improved Cooperative Spread Spectrum Based Robust Blind Image Watermarking," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 119-127, August 2020. doi: 10.12720/jait.11.3.119-127

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