High-capacity and robust watermarking scheme for small-scale vector data

For small-scale vector data, restrictions on watermark scheme capacity and robustness limit the use of copyright protection. A watermarking scheme based on robust geometric features and capacity maximization strategy that simultaneously improves capacity and robustness is presented in this paper. The distance ratio and angle of adjacent vertices are chosen as the watermark domain due to their resistance to vertex and geometric attacks. Regarding watermark embedding and extraction, a capacity-improved strategy based on quantization index modulation, which divides more intervals to carry sufficient watermark bits, is proposed. By considering the error tolerance of the vector map and the numerical accuracy, the optimization of the capacity-improved strategy is studied to maximize the embedded watermark bits for each vertex. The experimental results demonstrated that the map distortion caused by watermarks is small and much lower than the map tolerance. Additionally, the proposed scheme can embed a copyright image of 1024 bits into vector data of 150 vertices, which reaches capacity at approximately 14 bits/vertex, and shows prominent robustness against vertex and geometric attacks for small-scale vector data.