Semi-fragile spatial watermarking based on local binary pattern operators

Local binary pattern (LBP) operators, which measure the local contrast within a pixel's neighborhood, have been successfully applied to texture analysis, visual inspection, and image retrieval. In the paper, we present a novel semi-fragile spatial watermarking method based on LBP operators by using the local pixel contrast for the embedding and extraction of watermarks. We also propose a general framework for multi-level image watermarking. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking methods are robust against commonly-used image processing operations, such as additive noise, luminance change, contrast adjustment, color balance, and JPEG compression. At the same time, they achieve good invisibility, fragility, and image tamper detection and localization with less computational cost.