Wavelet-Hadamard based blind image watermarking using genetic algorithm and decision tree

Abstract

Recently the active use of Internet and multimedia technologies has increased the violation of copyright. Digital watermarking has a crucial role in the field of multimedia copyright protection. In this paper, an optimized image watermarking technique based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Hadamard transform is proposed. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is an optimizing technique used to satisfy the tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility. Blind property is conducted using the estimation capability of Decision Tree (DT). First the host image is transformed using second level DWT, then Hadamard transform is applied on selected DWT sub-bands. Adaptive multiple strength values are computed using GA. The watermark is successfully extracted using the trained DT which estimates the original coefficients needed for the extraction process without the need for the original host image. The proposed technique is evaluated against several types of attacks: compression, median filtering, salt and pepper noise, histogram equalization, blurring, scaling, painting, and cropping. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking technique is robust against these attacks while keeping good imperceptibility. The proposed technique outperforms the compared techniques according to robustness, imperceptibility, and capacity.