Watermark extraction under print-cam process using wave atoms based blind digital watermarking

Digital image watermarking is a data hiding technology, mainly utilized to protect intellectual ownership rights, can be utilized in exciting mobile applications for instantaneous watermark extraction. In this paper, we report the feasibility of wave atom transform (WAT) based blind digital watermarking for watermark detection under print-cam process. We investigate the robustness of WAT domain watermarking, based on sub-blocks mean energies comparison strategy, to read a watermark embedded in a printed image using a mobile phone camera. Watermark robust to print-cam process can allow instant copyright verification using a portable device and offer other interesting applications like accessing online resources, linking to personal homepage or instigating a service. We conduct experimental analysis to evaluate WAT based digital watermarking scheme’s performance to extract the embedded watermark from a printed domain image using a mobile phone camera. The experimental results show decent resistance of the scheme against print-cam process distortions.