Visible Watermarking Robust against Inpainting Using Seam Carving

Abstract

Visible watermarking techniques are considered as ideal technique to provide direct copyright protection for images and video. One important requirement of visible watermarking is robustness against removal attacks. However, inpainting methods can be used efficiently to remove visible watermarks. Inpainting techniques need the watermark to perform the removal attack, this watermark can be obtained browsing on the web or applying collusion attacks over many protected images. In this paper we propose a visible watermarking method robust to inpainting attacks. To protect the entire image and increase the robustness against removal attacks, different versions of the watermark pattern generated by seam carving method are embedded into the host image. The proposed system avoids the removal of the watermark by inpainting. The experimental results show that the visible watermark is still recognizable after the visible watermarked image is attacked by inpainting method.