Phase Watermarking of Images with Complex-Valued Linear-Phase Subband Filter Banks

A new algorithm is proposed for digital watermarking by applying complex-valued linear-phase filter banks to low frequency-band coefficients of images in the DCT domain. The watermark is conveyed in the phase spectrum of the subband coefficients. The robustness of the algorithm is examined in JPEG encoding with different qualities and compared with the DFT-based approach. Because only low frequency-band DCT coefficients are applied to complex-valued filter banks, the computational load introduced by the complex-valued filter banks is kept low. The watermark decoding is only accessible to users with the key information, i.e., impulse responses of the complex-valued linear-phase filter banks that designed with time-frequency spread property.