A preventive and curative watermarking scheme for an industrial solution.

Watermarking for identity images printed on a plastic card support is still challenging. In this application, the scheme must be robust against a combination of geometric and signal processing attacks related to the print/scan process. In addition, the scheme must deal with all the possible aggressions that a smart card can encounter during its lifetime. This paper investigates a robust watermarking solution in the Fourier domain in the continuity of our earlier developments reported in this field. It includes both preventive and curative stages that are complementary. The solution is preventive as only a small set of selected bits presenting a small variance are concerned the watermarking process. This property increases the chances of watermark detection rate while maintaining the same level of security. The curative part consists in pre-processing the watermarked image before the detection process. It comprises two specific and accurate counterattacks: the first one deals with blurring correction under a dedicated Wiener filter and the second one focuses on color corrections. The hybrid scheme is highly efficient and has a low computational cost. The new watermarking scheme clearly outperforms competitive approaches and is compatible with industrial constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]