Geometric invariance in image watermarking.

Surviving geometric attacks in image watermarking is considered to be of great importance. In this paper, the watermark is used in an authentication context. Two solutions are being proposed for such a problem. Both geometric and invariant moments are used in the proposed techniques. An invariant watermark is designed and tested against attacks performed by StirMark using the invariant moments. On the other hand, an image normalization technique is also proposed which creates a normalized environment for watermark embedding and detection. The proposed algorithms have the advantage of being robust, computationally efficient, and no overhead needs to be transmitted to the decoder side. The proposed techniques have proven to be highly robust to all geometric manipulations, filtering, compression and slight cropping which are performed as part of StirMark attacks as well as noise addition, both Gaussian and salt & pepper.