An effective robust and imperceptible blind color image watermarking using WHT

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is the most widely used recognized approach to protect data against piracy. This paper proposes a new blind color image watermarking based on the Walsh Hadamard Transform (WHT). The proposed method subdivides the image into 4 × 4 non-overlapping blocks, which are then transformed using WHT. The color image watermark is embedded in the third and fourth-row WHT coefficients using the proposed technique as a slight change in those rows may not profoundly affect the visual quality of an image. Then the difference of the third and fourth row WHT coefficients of the watermarked image is obtained. The watermark information is extracted using the attained difference value. The performance evaluation of the proposed scheme outperforms in terms of embedding capacity, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Weighted Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (WPSNR), Normalized cross-correlation (NC), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) than the conventional watermarking methods. This proposed method provides more robustness against several manipulations and lossy attacks.