A joint DWT-DCT based watermarking technique for avoiding unauthorized replication

Abstract

Use of image has been increasing in many applications. With the rapid development of the network multimedia systems, one can easily duplicate digital image. A digital image watermarking is a valid solution of protecting illegal manipulation of digital image. It embeds some secret information into the host image and this information uses for authentication. In this paper a joint DWT and DCT based watermarking technique with low frequency watermarking with weighted correction is proposed. DWT has excellent spatial localization, frequency spread and multi-resolution characteristics, which are similar to the theoretical models of the human visual system (HVS). DCT based watermarking techniques offer compression while DWT based watermarking techniques offer scalability. These desirable properties are used in this combined watermarking technique. In the proposed method watermark bits are embedded in the low frequency band of each DCT block of selected DWT sub-band. The weighted correction is also used to improve the imperceptibility. The extracting procedure reverses the embedding operations without the reference of the original image. Compared with the similar approach by DCT based approach and DWT based approach, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm apparently preserves superior image quality and robustness under various attacks such as JPEG compression, cropping, sharping, contrast adjustments and so on.