A Novel Visible Watermarking Scheme Based on Distance Transform

Visible watermarking is a common intellectual property protection mechanism for digital images. It is fulfilled by translucently overlaying a visual logo and/or a segment of text onto an image to declare the ownership of the image and thus deterring unauthorized usage to the image. This paper presents a novel visible watermarking technique by considering HVS characteristics and applying a distance transform function to evaluate appropriate stamping strength for individual watermark pixels. It exhibits lucid watermark pattern under moderate modification to the host image. Compare to uniform-contrast watermarks generated using conventional HVS based visible watermark schemes, the proposed method achieves better balance to the visual quality between the watermark and the image content beneath it.