Geometric correction code‐based robust image watermarking

Abstract Digital image watermarking is one of the effective schemes to protect the copyrights of still images. However, the existing watermarking schemes are still not robust enough to the common geometric transformation attacks such as arbitrary rotation, scaling and shifting with desirable hiding capacity. To address this issue, we propose a robust watermarking scheme based on geometric correction codes (GCCs). In this scheme, the watermark and pre‐set GCCs are combined and embedded into a cover image to obtain the watermarked image. At the stage of watermark extraction, the watermarked image, under a variety of geometric transformation attacks, can be geometrically corrected by minimising the difference between the extracted and the original GCCs, then the watermark is extracted from the watermarked image. The experiments demonstrate that, compared to the typical watermarking schemes, the proposed scheme achieves much higher robustness to the common geometric transformation attacks and comparable invisibility with the same embedding capacity.