Fuzzy‐based secure exchange of digital data using watermarking in NSCT‐RDWT‐SVD domain

Abstract

SummaryDue to the remarkable development of Internet technologies, a great deal of valuable digital data is now transmitted over public networks. To guarantee the security of this data during the transfer process, the authentication of its integrity is extremely important. This paper introduces a robust and secure dual‐watermarking‐based fusion of watermarking, optimization, and a compression method utilizing non‐sub‐sampled contourlet transform (NSCT), redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). In our method, we first apply the NSCT to a higher entropy sub‐band of the host image. Then, our method uses RDWT‐SVD on higher frequency coefficients of the NSCT image. A similar procedure is followed for both mark images. Finally, an appropriate scaling factor, as obtained by fuzzy inference system, is used to invisibly embed the singular values of both mark data into the host image. Here, any more important mark data are scrambled before the embedding process. The simulation tests reveal that the proposed technique is not only imperceptible and secure but also robust against common attacks. The suggested method has a superior ability to extract hidden information than previous conventional techniques.