High-dynamic range (HDR) images are circulated rapidly over the internet with risks of being exploited for unauthorized 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. 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, the binary watermark is partitioned into the foregrounds and backgrounds using the same mask and scrambled using a random permutation algorithm. Finally, the watermark segments are embedded into selected bit-plane of the corresponding host segments 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）图像在互联网上快速传播，面临被非法使用的风险。为保护此类图像，学者提出了若干基于HDR图像的水印方法（HDR-IW）。然而，这些方法继承了传统标准动态范围（SDR）图像水印方法的固有问题：仅能在相互矛盾的需求间进行权衡取舍，而无法实现同步提升。本文提出一种新型的基于显著性（视觉吸引目标）检测的独立权衡HDR-IW方法，可同时提升鲁棒性、不可见性和嵌入容量。首先，通过我们提出的显著性目标检测模型对宿主图像生成显著性图，进而利用该图分割宿主图像的前景与背景。其次，采用相同掩码将二值水印划分为前景和背景两部分，并利用随机置换算法进行置乱。最后，通过量化索引调制将水印分量嵌入对应宿主分量的特定位平面。实验结果表明，该方法在改善上述矛盾需求方面优于现有最优技术。