Multilevel Watermarking Scheme Based on Pseudo-barcoding for Handheld Mobile Devices

Abstract

Multimedia content provided by smartphones, laptops and tablets equipped by digital cameras presents a huge amount of images, audio and video clips in our daily life. Implementation of watermarking schemes for copyright protection on mobile devices remains an open issue due to specific features of mobile hardware. In this paper, we present a robust watermarking scheme for embedding textual information such as GPS coordinates in images shared via social media either in default mode or as the owner intends. The proposed algorithm is an extension of barcoding technique for binary notation called pseudo-barcoding. In addition, multilevel watermarking scheme realizes embedding of a fragile logo with customizable visibility and robust textual watermark embedding in a still image or frames of a video sequence. The implementation of the proposed algorithm is optimized for handheld mobile devices.