Watermarking with Association Rules Alignment.

A new watermarking technique called associative watermarking is proposed in this paper. The watermark in our new scheme will be embedded by applying the concept of association rules borrowed from the field of data mining. We implant the watermark's rules into the original image by changing a very small portion of the image's pixels during the rules alignment process. As a result, the robustness can be enhanced by emphasizing the specific rules mined from critical areas in the original image. Instead of transforming the watermark into its bit pattern, we just mine the association rules from the watermark and embed them into a colorful image. Our experimental results reveal that the PSNR value of the image after watermark implanting exceeds 40, and more than 90% of the watermarked images can be accurately recognized after similarity checking. Keywords: Association rule, Digital Watermarking, Image, Similarity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]