Novel attribute-based framework for halftone watermarking

A novel attribute-based framework is proposed to tackle the problem of halftone watermarking in combination of the spatial/transformation domain. The challenge is that the host image is continuous, while the watermarked halftone is bi-level. To search for a solution, an attribute image is defined as a good connection between the original grayscale image and its halftone image. When the attribute image is used as a watermark carrier, it helps to find the watermarked halftone efficiently by solving a constrained modified direct binary search problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme in comparison with other similar methods maintains high watermark capacity with good image quality, high robustness, processing efficiency and easy decoding. Especially it has a good performance in printing application.