A semi-fragile lossless digital watermarking scheme based on integer wavelet transform

In this paper, a new semi-fragile lossless digital watermarking scheme based on integer wavelet transform (IWT) is presented. Data are embedded into some IWT coefficients. The wavelet family applied is the 5/3 filter bank which serves as the default transformation in the JPEG2000 standard for image lossless compression. As a result, the proposed scheme can be integrated into the JPEG2000 standard smoothly. Different from the only existing semi-fragile lossless watermarking scheme, instead of using modulo 256 addition, this method takes special measures to prevent overflow/underflow (one of critical issue for lossless watermarking) and hence does not suffer from annoying salt-and-pepper noise. The exact cover media can be losslessly recovered if the stegoimage has not been altered. Furthermore, the hidden data can be extracted with no error even after incidental alterations including compression have been applied to the stegoimage (thus named after "semi-fragile").