Robust watermarking scheme for digital images using significant coefficients and the de-correlating principle

A robust watermarking scheme is proposed to protect the copyright of digital images. The imperceptibility and robustness of a digital watermark are crucial. However, these requirements are frequently conflicting. The proposed scheme lessens this conflict by employing the spread-spectrum technique and the de-correlating process, which introduces randomness and significance into transformed coefficients, and provides a complementary embedding to yield better robustness. Besides, the proposed scheme is a blind method, meaning that the watermark can be detected from the watermarked image without the original image. From simulation experiments, results indicate that our scheme is remarkably effective in resisting various attacks.