Independent Embedding Domain Based Two-Stage Robust Reversible Watermarking

Robustness is the most important factor that limits the practical application of reversible watermarking. To deal with this issue, several robust reversible watermarking (RRW) techniques have been proposed. Among them, the two-stage RRW framework proposed by Coltuc et al. is a promising one. In the first state of this framework, a robust watermark is embedded into the cover image to provide robustness, and then in the second stage, the information enabling revert the robust embedding is reversibly embedded into the already marked image to guarantee the reversibility. However, because of using the same area for these two embedding stages, the robustness in the first stage is seriously weakened by the reversible embedding. As a result, this elegant method is not effective as expected. Based on this consideration, this paper proposes an independent embedding domain (ED)-based two-stage RRW. The cover image is first transformed into two independent EDs, and then the robust and reversible watermarks are embedded into each domain separately. The carrier derived from the first embedding stage that carrying the robust watermark will not change after the reversible embedding, and thus, the robustness of the first stage is well preserved. By the proposed method, the embedding performance of the original two-stage RRW is significantly enhanced. Moreover, the proposed method is experimentally verified better than some other state-of-the-art RRW methods.