  Reversible visible watermarking (RVW) is an active copyright protection
mechanism. It not only transparently superimposes copyright patterns on
specific positions of digital images or video frames to declare the copyright
ownership information, but also completely erases the visible watermark image
and thus enables restoring the original host image without any distortion.
However, existing RVW algorithms mostly construct the reversible mapping
mechanism for a specific visible watermarking scheme, which is not versatile.
Hence, we propose a generic RVW framework to accommodate various visible
watermarking schemes. In particular, we obtain a reconstruction data packet --
the compressed difference image between the watermarked image and the original
host image, which is embedded into the watermarked image via any conventional
reversible data hiding method to facilitate the blind recovery of the host
image. The key is to achieve compact compression of the difference image for
efficient embedding of the reconstruction data packet. To this end, we propose
regularized Graph Fourier Transform (GFT) coding, where the difference image is
smoothed via the graph Laplacian regularizer for more efficient compression and
then encoded by multi-resolution GFTs in an approximately optimal manner.
Experimental results show that the proposed framework has much better
versatility than state-of-the-art methods. Due to the small amount of auxiliary
information to be embedded, the visual quality of the watermarked image is also
higher.
