Application of Fractal Image Model to Visible Watermarking

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an approach to visible watermarking based on fractal image model. A fractal image model consists of a set of affine transformations which is able to generate an image through the iterated function system (IFS). If a visible watermark can be arbitrarily chosen, then a fractal image model can be a candidate of watermark since the fractal model represents an image. This implies that the fractal model has equivalent information as that in its generated image. Based on the fractal image model, the proposed approach embeds the elements of affine transformations instead of the watermark itself. Consequently, only several bytes are required to store the fractal image model. Since the amount of data to be embedded is quite small, it is therefore to expect to have high peak signal-to-noise ratio and thus high visual quality. A simulation is provided to demonstrate the proposed approach. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach is feasible and promising.