Robust and secure fractional wavelet image watermarking

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient fractional wavelet transform (FWT) image watermarking technique based on combining the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the fractional Fourier transform (FRFT). In the proposed technique, the host image is wavelet transformed with two resolution levels, and then, the middle frequency sub-bands are FRFT transformed. The watermark is hidden by altering the selected FRFT coefficients of the middle frequency sub-bands of the 2-level DWT-transformed host image. Two pseudo-random noise (PN) sequences are used to modulate the selected FRFT coefficients with the watermark pixels, and inverse transforms are finally applied to get the watermarked image. In watermark extraction, we just need the same two PN sequences used in the embedding process and the watermark size. The correlation factor is used to determine whether the extracted pixel is one or zero. The proposed fractional wavelet transform (FWT) image watermarking method is tested with different image processing attacks and under composite attacks to verify its robustness. Experimental results demonstrated improved robustness and security.