A robust blind hybrid image watermarking scheme in RDWT-DCT domain using Arnold scrambling

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To compromise between imperceptibility and robustness property of robust image watermarking technique, a RDWT-DCT based blind image watermarking scheme using Arnold scrambling is presented in this paper. Firstly, RDWT (Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform) is applied to each gray scale cover image block after the image is decomposed into fixed size non overlapping blocks. Secondly, the binary watermark logo is encrypted by Arnold chaotic map and reshaped to a sequence to improve the security of the logo. In the subsequent step, DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) is employed on each LH subband of the non-overlapping host image block. Finally, after zigzag scanning of each DCT block a binary bit of watermark is embedded into each block by adjusting some middle significant AC coefficients using repetition code. Experimental results show that robustness is achieved by recovering satisfactory watermark data from the reconstructed cover image after applying common geometric transformation attacks (like rotation, cropping, scaling, shearing and deletion of lines or column operation etc.), common enhancement technique attacks (like lowpass filtering, histogram equalization, sharpening, gamma correction, noise addition etc.) and JPEG compression attacks. The proposed scheme is also tested to verify the robustness performance against standard benchmark software "Checkmark" and satisfactory results are achieved against the Checkmark attacks such as Hard and Soft Thresholding, Template Removal, Warping, Dithering, Remodulation and Downsampling/Upsampling etc.