A novel watermarking method based on differential evolutionary algorithm and wavelet transform

Abstract

In this paper, a new Watermarking method based on the optimization framework and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is presented. In this method, first, the watermark image is divided into several blocks. Then, using differential evolution (DE) algorithm, an appropriate location for each of these blocks is found in the cover image. In the proposed method, the results of the DE algorithm, which is needed for the reconstruction phase are also embedded as a vector in the cover image under the wavelet domain. Also, to achieve the highest PSNR in the reconstruction phase, the optimal values for Alpha-blending coefficients (used in the embedding and extraction process) are determined with the multi-objective DE-based optimization algorithm. Several experiments are presented to illustrate the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed algorithm against different types of attacks, including salt and pepper, Gaussian, median filtering, rescaling, compression, and rotation. The obtained results are also compared with state-of-the-art methods and show the superiority of the proposed method in most cases.