Media hash-dependent image watermarking resilient against both geometric attacks and estimation attacks based on false positive-oriented detection

The major disadvantage of existing watermarking methods is their limited resistance to extensive geometric attacks. In addition, we have found that the weakness of multiple watermark embedding methods that were initially designed to resist geometric attacks is their inability to withstand the watermark-estimation attacks (WEAs), leading to reduce resistance to geometric attacks. In view of these facts, this paper proposes a robust image watermarking scheme that can withstand geometric distortions and WEAs simultaneously. Our scheme is mainly composed of three components: 1) robust mesh generation and mesh-based watermarking to resist geometric distortions; 2) construction of media hash-based content-dependent watermark to resist WEAs; and 3) a mechanism of false positive-oriented watermark detection, which can be used to determine the existence of a watermark so as to achieve a tradeoff between correct detection and false detection. Furthermore, extensive experimental results obtained using the standard benchmark (i.e., Stirmark) and WEAs, and comparisons with relevant watermarking methods confirm the excellent performance of our method in improving robustness. To our knowledge, such a thorough evaluation has not been reported in the literature before.