Blind Image Watermarking in Canonical and Cepstrum Domains Based on 4-Connected t-o’clock Scrambling

Farhana Shirin Chowdhury,Pranab Kumar Dhar,Takeshi Koshiba,Kaushik Deb

doi:10.3390/sym12020266

Abstract

Copyright protection of multimedia content is confronted with great challenges such as easy access to the Internet. Digital watermarking is widely applicable technique for copyright protection of multimedia contents. In this paper, a blind symmetric watermarking method in canonical and cepstrum domains based on four-connected t-o’clock scrambling is proposed. Initially, the watermark image is scrambled using the four-connected t-o’clock method to enhance the security. Then, the rotation operation is applied to the host image to extract the region where the watermark bits are embedded. After that, discrete linear canonical transform (DLCT) is applied to the extracted region to obtain the DLCT region. Cepstrum transform (CT) is performed on DLCT region to attain CT region. The CT region is then divided into non-overlapping blocks. The watermark bits are inserted into each block using max-heap and min-heap tree property. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method shows high robustness against numerous attacks. Moreover, it produces high quality watermarked images and provides high security. Furthermore, it has superior performance to recent methods in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and security.

Highlights

In today’s ever-changing world, Internet technology has become an imminent part of our day-to-day life
A watermark is a piece of information that is embedded into multimedia data such as text, audio, image, and video by the owner to ensure the authenticity of the data
We evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm and compared it with some recent methods

Summary

Introduction

In today’s ever-changing world, Internet technology has become an imminent part of our day-to-day life. With the benefits of the Internet, we can copy, transmit, distribute, and store information [1]. Different types of online business sectors face a huge loss every year due to copyright violations. To solve this problem, in recent years, a new form of media content protection has evolved, known as watermarking. A watermark is a piece of information that is embedded into multimedia data such as text, audio, image, and video by the owner to ensure the authenticity of the data. Point discrete LCT (DLCT) of f(n’) can be defined as [28] f (m ) = N 0 −1 ∑.

Methods

Results

Conclusion