Enhancing copyright protection with Hadamard transform-based blind digital watermarking using the cycling chaos system

Abstract

The network's ease of use has brought a copyright dilemma for some multimedia works. It is consequently necessary to develop a safe digital watermarking technology to guarantee the protection of digital work's copyright. The proposed method addresses the pressing need for robust blind digital watermarking technology to safeguard the copyrights of multimedia works in the face of the accessibility provided by modern networks. Two approaches are presented in our research paper. First, a blind Hadamard transform-based method is proposed, leveraging the energy concentration concept inherent in the transform. This technique embeds watermarks into the highest energy coefficients of color host images in the transform domain. Notably, watermark extraction is achieved without accessing the original data. Extensive simulation tests validate the efficacy of this method. Second, we have explored the burgeoning field of chaotic systems in watermarking. An LSB-based strategy, termed the cycling chaos algorithm, is introduced. This approach seamlessly integrates data, into color images using the least significant bits. It employs a cycling chaos function to generate a key for a pseudorandom number generator, which, in turn, determines the intensity and pixel positions for storing privileged data in the original image. Through simulation trials, the significant impact of this method on various performance metrics is demonstrated. These contributions aim to not only address immediate copyright protection challenges but also inspire further exploration and advancement in digital watermarking.