Robust image watermarking scheme in lifting wavelet domain using GA-LSVR hybridization

Abstract

This paper presents an imperceptible, robust, secure and efficient image watermarking scheme in lifting wavelet domain using combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and Lagrangian support vector regression (LSVR). First, four subbands low–low (LL), low–high (LH), high–low (HL) and high–high (HH) are obtained by decomposing the host image from spatial domain to frequency domain using one level lifting wavelet transform. Second, the approximate image (LL subband) is divided into non overlapping blocks and the selected blocks based on the fuzzy entropy are used to embed the binary watermark. Third, based on the correlation property of each transformed selected block, significant lifting wavelet coefficient act as target to LSVR and its neighboring coefficients (called feature vector) are set as input to LSVR to find optimal regression function. This optimal regression function is used to embed and extract the scrambled watermark. In the proposed scheme, GA is used to solve the problem of optimal watermark embedding strength, based on the noise sensitivity of each selected block, in order to increase the imperceptibility of the watermark. Due to the good learning capability and high generalization property of LSVR against noisy datasets, high degree of robustness is achieved and is well suited for copyright protection applications. Experimental results on standard and real world images show that proposed scheme not only efficient in terms of computational cost and memory requirement but also achieve good imperceptibility and robustness against geometric and non geometric attacks like JPEG compression, median filtering, average filtering, addition of noise, sharpening, scaling, cropping and rotation compared with the state-of-art techniques.