In this paper, three different perceptual masks in the wavelet domain are investigated for image watermarking systems. Along with an already existing method, we present two alternative perceptual masks based on visual detection thresholds in Y, Cb and Cr color channels and on the JPEG2000 significance coding step. A procedure to compare the perceptual masks consists on evaluating on one side, the PSNR and the S-CIELAB visual quality measure and on the other side, the detection performance by a blind watermarking scheme. Experimental results proof the better performance of the two alternative masks as well as the insights that can be derived from the comparison approach. © 2004 EUSIPCO.

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