Digital watermarking algorithm based on scale-invariant feature regions in non-subsampled contourlet transform domain

Contraposing the need of the robust digital watermark for the copyright protection field, a new digital watermarking algorithm in the non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain is proposed. The largest energy sub-band after NSCT is selected to embed watermark. The watermark is embedded into scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) regions. During embedding, the initial region is divided into some cirque sub-regions with the same area, and each watermark bit is embedded into one sub-region. Extensive simulation results and comparisons show that the algorithm gets a good trade-off of invisibility, robustness and capacity, thus obtaining good quality of the image while being able to effectively resist common image processing, and geometric and combo attacks, and normalized similarity is almost all reached.