An Improved Watermarking Technique for Copyright Protection Based on Tchebichef Moments

Abstract

Watermarking technique is a method to protect ownership of digital multimedia. Most existing watermarking techniques achieve a good level of imperceptibility and robustness. The challenges to achieve higher invisibility and resistance with lower computational time motivate researchers to work on new watermarking schemes. Robustness against noise attacks and JPEG2000 compression needs to be improved to acquire a better resistance capability of the watermark. In this paper, we present a block-based Tchebichef watermarking technique for protecting copyrights. In this technique, the host image is first divided into non-overlapping blocks and Tchebichef moments are calculated for each block. The watermarks are embedded into the blocks with lower visual entropies. The watermark image is scrambled by Arnold transform before embedding into the Tchebichef moments of the selected image blocks. The proposed watermarking scheme was tested under noise additions, filtering, cropping and compressing attacks. Our scheme was verified and compared to the existing watermarking techniques under image geometric and processing attacks. Furthermore, the proposed scheme demonstrated a superior performance in robustness under noise attacks and JPEG2000.