Lossless Color Image Watermarking Based on Lifting Scheme and GWO for Copyright Protection

Abstract

Due to fast development in digital technologies, numerous gateways are available to alter easily the contents of digital multimedia without noticeable changes by human beings. These features provide breakthrough to copy, store, and transmit digital data and also it has made illegal replication/distribution of digital content. Hence, digital rights management (DRM) is essentially required to solve the issues related to data security and owner’s authentication of multimedia resources and contents. In this paper, lossless color image watermarking scheme based on lifting scheme and grey wolf optimization (GWO) for copyright protection has been proposed. To optimize the strength factor, alpha, GWO has been used in proposed work. With optimized strength factor, the insertion of color watermark has been done into the host image by changing the singular values of the host/cover image. Scrambling of watermark has also been carried out by Arnold transform to provide more security and robustness. Performance analysis of presented work has been verified both quantitatively and qualitatively by using different fidelity parameters like, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) index, and normalized correlation coefficient (NCC). To prove the strength, the present work has also been compared with considered image watermarking techniques.