Digital image watermarking in frequency domain

Abstract

Watermarking is a technology that complements cryptography by embedding imperceptible signals in work. Information hiding techniques have recently become important in a number of application areas. Digital audio, video and images are increasingly furnished with distinguishing but imperceptible marks, which may contain a hidden copyright notice that helps to prevent unauthorized copying directly. One approach is to introduce an invisible image known as digital watermark, into an image sequence. This paper presents secured algorithms for embedding digital watermarks into images. The proposed method performs imperceptible watermarking of images in frequency domain. The watermark is embedded in the DWT and DCT domain of an image in a multi-resolution way. In the decoding phase, once the watermark is extracted from the watermarked image, certain performance measures such as peak signal to mean noise ratio (PSNR) and correlation are calculated. Different types of attacks have been applied to the watermarked image to test the robustness of the applied technique and for each case, PSNR and correlation are calculated. Even though DWT method gives better results when compared to DCT, performances of both methods are good.