Digital Image Watermarking Method Based on LSB and DWT Hybrid Technique

Abstract

The watermarking technique can be considered as an important mechanism to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of multimedia contents. Currently, most of multimedia contents are exchanged online in a digital form, which exposes the content to be illegal alteration easily without recognize theoffenders. Digital watermarking is used to embed a watermark into the digital media in such away that can not be discovered from the original watermarked data. Consequently, the watermark can be removed and used to verify the copyright ownership of that digital media. In this paper, a hybrid watermarking technique based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is introduced and explained.. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid technique in terms of robustness and imperceptibility, a comparison between the three techniques is also presented. This comparison was carried out using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). The SSIM results were very close to 1, which means that the recovered watermarks from watermarked image were not distorted in the three cases. The PSNR and MSE values show that the quality of the watermarked images using the proposed technique is better compared to that watermarked images using standalone LSB and DWT. Moreover, the results prove that the proposed hybrid technique was more effective in terms of robustness and imperceptibility compared to LSB and DWT techniques