High-dynamic range (HDR) images are circulated rapidly over the internet with risks of being exploited for unauthenticated usage. To protect these images, some HDR image based watermarking (HDR-IW) methods were put forward. However, they inherited the same problem faced by conventional IW methods for standard dynamic range (SDR) images, where only trade-offs among conflicting requirements are managed instead of simultaneous improvement. In this paper, a novel saliency (eye-catching object) detection based trade-off independent HDR-IW is proposed, to simultaneously improve robustness, imperceptibility and payload capacity. First, the host image goes through our proposed salient object detection model to produce a saliency map, which is, in turn, exploited to segment the foreground and background of the host image. Next, binary watermark is partitioned into the foregrounds and backgrounds using the same mask and scrambled using the random permutation algorithm. Finally, the watermark segments are embedded into the corresponding host segments (i.e., selected bit-plane) using quantized indexed modulation. Experimental results suggest that the proposed work outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of improving the conflicting requirements.

翻译：高动态范围(HDR)图像在网络中快速传播，存在被未经授权使用的风险。为保护此类图像，研究者提出了若干基于HDR图像的水印(HDR-IW)方法。然而，这些方法沿袭了传统标准动态范围(SDR)图像水印方法面临的同一问题：仅能在相互冲突的要求之间进行权衡，而非实现同步提升。本文提出一种新颖的、基于显著性(引人注目物体)检测的无权衡HDR-IW方法，旨在同时提升鲁棒性、不可感知性和有效载荷容量。首先，宿主图像通过我们提出的显著性目标检测模型生成显著性图，进而利用该图划分宿主图像的前景与背景。随后，采用相同掩码将二值水印分割为前景与背景部分，并通过随机排列算法进行置乱。最后，利用量化索引调制将水印片段嵌入对应宿主片段(即选定比特平面)中。实验结果表明，本方法在改善上述冲突性要求方面优于现有先进方法。