A Hybrid Approach of DWT and DCT for Rational Dither Modulation Watermarking

Abstract

In this paper, on the basis of the theories and methods of Watson’s perceptual model and rational dither modulation (RDM), a hybrid quantization-based watermarking in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) domains is studied. In the design of the quantization-based watermarking, quantization step-size plays an important role in many watermarking algorithms. RDM at both the embedder and decoder adopts a gain-invariant adaptive quantization step-size. Therefore, we investigated combining the modified Watson’s perceptual model with RDM. Its improved robustness is due to the embedding in the high entropy region of low-frequency sub-band image and adaptive control of its quantization step-size. The Euclidean distance decoder is used to extract the watermark data. The performance of the proposed scheme is analytically calculated and verified by simulation. Experimental results confirm the imperceptibility of the proposed watermarking and its higher robustness against attacks compared to alternative watermarking methods in the literature.