CERIAS Tech Report 2001-68 The Effect of Matching Watermark and Compression Transforms in Compressed Color Images

The growth of networked multimedia systems has complicated copyright enforcement relative to digital images. One way to protect the copyright of digital images is to add an invisible structure to the image (known as a digital watermark) to identify the owner. In particular, it is important for Internet and image database applications that as much of the watermark as possible remain in the image after compression. Image adaptive watermarks are particularly resistant to removal by signal processing attacks such as filtering or compression. Common image adaptive watermarks operate in the transform domain (DCT or wavelet); the same domains are also used for popular image compression techniques (JPEG, EZW). This paper investigates whether matching the watermarking domain to the compression transform domain will make the watermark more robust to compression.