Abstract

Current digital watermarking methods based on the discrete wavelet transform use orthogonal wavelet kernels. In this paper, we discuss the use of morphological wavelets, which are a class of non-linear wavelets, in digital watermarking for scalable coded images. Three different scenarios for embed-ding the watermark, namely, 1) embedding only in the low pass subband (low-low), 2) embedding only in the high pass subbands (low-high, high-low and high-high) and 3) embed-ding in all subbands are considered to model popular wavelet domain watermarking methods. The performance of morpho-logical Haar and higher length median wavelets in terms of embedding and detection under content adaptation attacks, such as resolution and quality scalable decoding are shown. Morphological wavelets based watermarking shows a high ro-bustness against the content adaptation attacks, especially in resolution scalability, compared to the conventional orthogo-nal wavelets based watermarking. 1.