Natural speckle-based watermarking with random-like illuminated decoding

We propose an optical watermarking method based on a natural speckle pattern. In the watermarking process, the watermark information is embedded into the natural speckle pattern. Then the random-like watermarked image is generated with the proposed grayscale reordering algorithm. During the extraction procedure, the watermarked image is projected to the natural speckle pattern as illumination. Subsequently, they are incoherently superimposed to extract the watermark information directly by human vision. Optical experiments and a hypothesis test are conducted to demonstrate the proposed method with high reliability, imperceptibility and robustness. The proposed method is the first watermarking method utilizing the natural diffuser as the core element in encoding and decoding.