Cocktail watermarking for digital image protection

A novel image protection scheme called 'cocktail watermarking' is proposed in this paper. We analyze and point out the inadequacy of the modulation techniques commonly used in ordinary spread spectrum watermarking methods and the visual model-based ones. To resolve the inadequacy, two watermarks which play complementary roles are simultaneously embedded into a host image. We also conduct a statistical analysis to derive the lower bound of the worst likelihood that the better watermark (out of the two) can be extracted. With this 'high' lower bound, it is ensured that a 'better' extracted watermark is always obtained. From extensive experiments, results indicate that our cocktail watermarking scheme is remarkably effective in resisting various attacks, including combined ones.