Digital Watermarking Technique for Images with Perspective Distortion

In this paper, a problem of geometrically distorted images is considered. In particular, the paper discusses the detection of a watermark from a photographed image of the watermarked picture. The image is possibly obtained by using a digital camera. This watermark detection problem is made difficult by various geometric distortions added to the original picture through the printing and photographing processes. In particular, the paper focuses on the geometric distortion due to a projective transformation, as part of a camera 3D-to-2D imaging process. It is well-known that a cross ratio of collinear points is invariant under a perspective projection. By exploiting this fact, a projective-invariant digital watermarking technique is developed. By detecting the picture's corners, and the image center point at the intersection of two main diagonal lines, predefined cross ratios are used to compute the watermark embedded locations. From those identified embedding pixel locations, a watermark can be detected by performing a correlation between a watermark pattern and the image over those pixels. The proposed method does not require an inverse transformation on the distorted image, thus simplifying the detection process. Performance of the proposed method has been analyzed through computer experiments