Minimum-impact-on-classifier (MIC) watermarking for protection of remote sensing imagery

The application of digital watermarking to remote sensing images requires a careful quality assessment in order to understand how the data quality is affected by the watermark. We propose a watermarking approach that minimizes the watermark impact on image classification, based on the idea of modulating the insertion coefficient in each channel so as to preserve to a larger extent the channels which classification is most sensitive to; we also propose a simplified procedure for estimating cluster displacement due to watermarking, leading to a low-complexity insertion approach. Experimental results on Landsat 7 ETM+ and IKONOS images show that the proposed MIC approach is able to significantly reduce classification errors, and to keep them within the intrinsic classification error