Image Watermarking Scheme With Unequal Protection Capability Based on Error Correcting Codes

Abstract

We propose a novel image watermarking scheme capable of providing unequal protection levels to different regions. In the scheme, we firstly construct the unequal error protection (UEP) code by designing an unequal coding space using algebra means, then we divide the image into high protection region, low protection region and non-protection region, and use the UEP code to encode the bits generated by high and low protection regions simultaneously and form the watermark bits to embed in the non-protection region. On the receiver side, the extracted bits with UEP capability can restore the high protection region more correctly than the low protection region after the efficient decoding algorithm is applied.