A halftone watermarking method of high quality, robustness, and capacity flexibility is presented in this paper. An objective halftone image quality evaluation method based on the human visual system obtained by a least-mean-square algorithm is also introduced. In the encoder, the kernels-alternated error diffusion (KAEDF) is applied. It is able to maintain the computational complexity at the same level as ordinary error diffusion. Compared with Hel-Or using ordered dithering, the proposed KAEDF yields a better image quality through using error diffusion. We also propose a weighted lookup table (WLUT) in the decoder instead of lookup table (LUT), as proposed by Pei and Guo, so as to achieve a higher decoded rate. As the experimental results demonstrate, this technique is able to guard against degradation due to tampering, cropping, rotation, and print-and-scan processes in error-diffused halftone images.
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