Contourlet and discrete cosine transform based quality guaranteed robust image watermarking method using artificial bee colony algorithm

Abstract

Today, advances in photo editing and manipulation software and widespread access to social media have made it easier for unauthorized persons to manipulate and copy digital images. Therefore, studies on protecting the copyright of images have been increasing in recent years. This paper proposes a Contourlet, discrete cosine transform, and singular value decomposition based robust image watermarking method using Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm to obtain high robustness with a predetermined quality threshold. In the proposed method, the strength factor and embedding positions are optimally determined using the ABC algorithm for each image. The predetermined quality threshold defined in the optimization procedure guarantees a PSNR value higher than 40 dB to ensure high imperceptibility. The robustness of the proposed method was evaluated by applying a total of thirteen attacks from five different attack groups. Results confirmed that the presented method is robust to the compression, noise, enhancement, geometric, and filtering attacks.