Image Watermarking Against Vintage and Retro Photo Effects

Vintage and retro photo effects from various photo and camera software are popular. They are typically obtained from various image processing techniques. However when such effects are applied to watermarked image, they can partially or fully damage watermark information inside the watermarked image. In this paper, we propose an image watermarking method in spatial domain in which the embedded watermark can survive vintage and retro photo effects. Technically, the watermark is embedded by modifying the luminance component in YCbCr color space of a host color image. For watermark extraction, a mean filter is utilized to predict original embedding component from the watermarked components, and each watermark bit is blindly recovered by differentiating both components. The watermarked image’s quality is evaluated by weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio, while the extracted watermark’s accuracy is evaluated by bit correction rate. The experimental results under various percentages of vintage and retro photo effects show that our proposed method was superior to the previous method.