Evaluation of standard watermarking techniques

In the last decade digital watermarking techniques have been devised to answer the ever-growing need to protect the intellectual property of digital still images, video sequences or audio from piracy attacks. Because of the proliferation of watermarking algorithms and their applications some benchmarks have been created in order to help watermarkers comparing their algorithms in terms of robustness against various attacks (i.e. Stirmark, Checkmark). However, no equal attention has been devoted to the proposition of benchmarks tailored to assess the watermark perceptual transparency. In this work, we study several watermarking techniques in terms of the mark invisibility through subjective experiments. Moreover, we test the ability of several objective metrics, used in the literature mainly to evaluate distortions due to the coding process, to be correlated with subjective scores. The conclusions drawn in the paper are supported by extensive experimentations using both several watermarking techniques and objective metrics.