A robust blind watermarking scheme based on lifting wavelet transform and hessenberg decomposition

Abstract

In this paper, a novel robust blind grayscale image digital watermarking scheme is introduced based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) in combination with discrete cosine transform (DCT), Hessenberg decomposition, and entropy analysis for copyright protection of multimedia information. At first, the two levels of LWT are applied to the host grayscale image to improve the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme and then the high-frequency sub-band of the 2-level of LWT is decomposed by DCT. Next, the DCT coefficients are divided into 4×4 non-overlapping blocks. After that, Hessenberg decomposition performs on each selected block, whereas the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix is utilized to hide the watermark. To evaluate the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed digital watermarking scheme, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and normalized cross-correlation (NC) are utilized to measure the quality and the ability of the proposed watermarking scheme to robust against signal processing operations and geometric attacks. Experimental and analysis results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is achieved a very good tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison with other scheme have shown that the proposed digital watermarking schemes have a superior performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness than other.