Robust and optimum color image watermarking method based on a combination of DWT and DCT

Abstract

A hybrid and robust digital image watermarking is suggested by using advantages of both frequency domain and wavelet domain. In this method, the most suitable color component of the host image and the most efficient wavelet sub-band are chosen, concluding from the comprehensive experiments. In this paper, three parallel stages are used to embed and extract the watermark message. After transforming color component of the host image into the wavelet domain, some preprocessing with Discrete Cosines Transformers are applied, and then the watermark message is embedded into the best range by using a secret key. By detecting the rank of constructed detection matrices and voting among three output bits, the watermark bit is extracted. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method, besides the high robustness against Gaussian noise-based attacks especially AWGN, has performed well in imperceptibility and embedding capacity factors.