Saliency detection and quantization index modulation based high payload HDR image watermarking

High-dynamic range (HDR) images are circulated rapidly over the internet with risks of being exploited for unauthenticated usage. To protect these images, some HDR image based watermarking (HDR-IW) methods were put forward. However, they inherited the same problem faced by conventional IW methods for standard dynamic range (SDR) images, where only trade-offs among conflicting requirements are managed instead of simultaneous improvement. In this paper, a novel saliency (eye-catching object) detection based trade-off independent HDR-IW is proposed, to simultaneously improve robustness, imperceptibility and payload capacity. First, the host image goes through our proposed salient object detection model to produce a saliency map, which is, in turn, exploited to segment the foreground and background of the host image. Next, binary watermark is partitioned into the foregrounds and backgrounds using the same mask and scrambled using the random permutation algorithm. Finally, the watermark segments are embedded into the corresponding host segments (i.e., selected bit-plane) using quantized indexed modulation. Experimental results suggest that the proposed work outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of improving the conflicting requirements.