  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.
