Copyright © 2012 Guoyan Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper proposes a new dynamic and robust blind watermarking scheme for color pathological image based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The binary watermark image is preprocessed before embedding; firstly it is scrambled by Arnold cat map and then encrypted by pseudorandom sequence generated by robust chaotic map. The host image is divided into blocks, and the encrypted watermark is embedded into the higher frequency domain of blue component. The mean and variance of the subbands are calculated, to dynamically modify the wavelet coefficient of a block according to the embedded 0 or 1, so as to generate the detection threshold. We research the relationship between embedding intensity and threshold and give the effective range of the threshold to extract the watermark. Experimental results show that the scheme can resist against common distortions, especially getting advantage over JPEG compression, additive noise, brightening, rotation, and cropping.