Image watermarking refers to the process of embedding an authentication message, called watermark, into the host image to uniquely identify the ownership. In this paper, an adaptive, scalable, blind and robust wavelet-based watermarking approach is proposed. The proposed approach enables scalable watermark detection and provides robustness against progressive wavelet image compression. A multiresolution decomposition of the binary watermark is inserted into the selected coefficients of the wavelet-decomposed image that represent the high activity regions of the image. The watermark insertion is started from the lowest frequency sub-band of the decomposed image and each decomposed watermark subband is inserted into its counterpart sub-band of the decomposed image. In the lowest frequency sub-band, coefficients with maximum local variance and in the higher frequency sub-bands, coefficients with maximum magnitude are selected. The watermarked test images are transparent according to the human vision system characteristics and do not show any perceptual degradation. The experimental results very efficiently prove the robustness of the approach against progressive wavelet image coding even at very low bit rates. The watermark extraction process is completely blind and multiple spatial resolutions of the watermark are progressively detectable from the compressed watermarked image. This approach is a suitable candidate for providing efficient authentication for progressive image transmission applications especially over heterogeneous networks, such as the Internet.
