Robust Image Watermarking Technique Research Articles

A robust digital image watermarking technique in LWT-DCT domain using particle swarm optimization and statistical distortion correction

A robust digital image watermarking technique in LWT-DCT domain using particle swarm optimization and statistical distortion correction

Robust Image Watermarking using DWT, DCT, and PSO with CNN-Based Attack Evaluation

Digital Content Protection is one of the most significant research areas that lies at the intersection of cyber-security and multimedia processing. Protect multimedia content from copyright violation, unauthorized use, replication, and online content theft is needed. Digital Image Watermarking is utilized to preserve the copyright of different digital images from forgery. Various techniques had been developed in this regard with two main issues, the method robustness and the resistance against various types of attacks like, Salt and Pepper noise, filtering and blurring. Current Digital watermarking techniques may reduce the quality of the original digital media content if it is not robust. The purpose of this research is to create a robust image watermarking technique against different attack types such as salt and pepper noise and Gaussian noise, ensuring the image content is protected. Specifically, this study proposed a new mechanism for Image watermarking based on combining Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Additionally, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) was applied to perform the optimization for both the embedding and extraction processes. At the final stage we assess the proposed approach against some types of attacks such as Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). The Denoising Convolutional Neural Network, (DnCNN) was used to evaluate the mechanism against AWGN. For testing, we utilized measures such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Correlation Coefficient (NCC). The experimental results of implementing our proposed method for embedding and extracting watermarks across various host image sizes were encouraging, achieving a PSNR ratio of 0.998 and an NCC of 1 in the absence of attacks. Additionally, our evaluation revealed that a specific type of denoising attack, while damaging the watermark (though not completely), actually improved the image quality. It is also important to highlight that our findings surpassed those reported in existing literature, with the PSNR and NCC values serving as evidence of this superior performance.

Deep learning-based image watermarking technique with hybrid DWT-SVD

ABSTRACT In digital media copyright protection, image watermarking topologies afford a promising solution. But the robustness of watermarking methods should be considered. Therefore, a robust image watermarking technique has been proposed to show better robustness against rotation attacks and other issues in watermarking. In this work, the Deep Belief Network (DBN) is trained by the Bear Smell Search Algorithm (BSSA) during the first phase. The second phase is the embedding phase, which utilizes the hybrid transform domain of Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition (DWT-SVD). After embedding, the extraction is performed with the help of a Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN). The experiments are conducted on four kinds of host images such as Barbara, Peppers, Person and Lena. Experimental results proved that the superiority of our proposed method achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy.

A Blind Robust Image Watermarking on Selected DCT Coefficients for Copyright Protection

This paper proposes a blind and robust image watermarking technique using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for copyright protection on color images called BRIW-DCT. Each channel of the host image is divided into non-overlapping image blocks with the size of 8×8 pixels. Each image block is transformed into a frequency domain using the DCT transformation. The watermark image is embedded into the host image by modifying the 11th to the 15th DCT coefficient. The experimental result shows that the watermarked image achieved a high PSNR value of 50.4489 dB and a high SSIM value of 0.9991. Furthermore, various attacks are performed on the watermarked image. BRIW-DCT can successfully recover the watermark image from the tampered image, which produces a high NC value of 0.7805 and a low BER value of 0.1126.

LWT-DCT based Image Watermarking Scheme using Normalized SVD

Background: Nowadays information security is one of the biggest issues of social networks. The multimedia data can be tampered with, and the attackers can then claim its ownership. Image watermarking is a technique that is used for copyright protection and authentication of multimedia. Objective: We aim to create a new and more robust image watermarking technique to prevent illegal copying, editing and distribution of media. Method : The watermarking technique proposed in this paper is non-blind and employs Lifting Wavelet Transform on the cover image to decompose the image into four coefficient matrices. Then Discrete Cosine Transform is applied which separates a selected coefficient matrix into different frequencies and later Singular Value Decomposition is applied. Singular Value Decomposition is also applied to the watermarking image and it is added to the singular matrix of the cover image which is then normalized followed by the inverse Singular Value Decomposition, inverse Discrete Cosine Transform and inverse Lifting Wavelet Transform respectively to obtain an embedded image. Normalization is proposed as an alternative to the traditional scaling factor. Results: Our technique is tested against attacks like rotation, resizing, cropping, noise addition and filtering. The performance comparison is evaluated based on Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Structural Similarity Index Measure, and Normalized Cross-Correlation. Conclusion: The experimental results prove that the proposed method performs better than other state-of-the-art techniques and can be used to protect multimedia ownership.

Robust and imperceptible image watermarking technique based on SVD, DCT, BEMD and PSO in wavelet domain

Robust and imperceptible image watermarking technique based on SVD, DCT, BEMD and PSO in wavelet domain

Robust and Secure Digital Image Watermarking Technique Using Arnold Transform and Memristive Chaotic Oscillators

With the advent of technology and multimedia production, the world has witnessed a tremendous increase in digital media attacks, which duplicates, forges and tamper the data leading to the violation of copyright laws. In this paper, a robust and secure digital image watermarking is proposed, which exploits the chaotic behaviour of the non – linear oscillators realized through Memristive diodes. The proposed scheme relies on a Human Visual System (HVS) model in order to mimic the real-life scenario. To improve the robustness of the proposed approach and to further increase the security of the digital watermarked media whilst still retaining compatibility with the real-time events, Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and extreme learning machine (ELM) is implemented. Secure key generation by means of scrambling through Arnold Transform and the coefficients of Memristive Chaotic Oscillator ensures extreme security. The watermark embedding followed the pixel transformation based on discrete cosine coefficient modification, and a semi-blind watermarking extraction procedure was carried out through trained ELM models. A detailed analysis has been presented to evaluate the tradeoff between imperceptibility, security and robustness using performance metrics like PSNR, NC, SSIM, and BER. To establish a real-time implementation of the proposed architecture, the simulated results were verified using real-time chaotic signals generated from the chaotic oscillator, which dictates excellent performance against watermarking attacks and image processing tasks.

Robust medical image watermarking technique using integer wavelet transform and shearlet transform with BSVD

Robust medical image watermarking technique using integer wavelet transform and shearlet transform with BSVD

A hybrid OFDM–CDMA-based robust image watermarking technique

Digital watermarking is a process of embedding hidden information called watermark into different kinds of media objects. It uses basic modulation, multiplexing and transform techniques of communication for hiding information. Traditional techniques used are least significant bit (LSB) modification, discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete Fourier transform (DFT), code division multiple access (CDMA) or a combination of these. Among these, CDMA is the most robust against different attacks except geometric attacks. This paper proposes a blind and highly robust watermarking technique by utilizing the basis of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and CDMA communication system. In this scheme, the insertion process starts by taking DFT of host images, permuting the watermark bits in randomized manner and recording them in a seed as a key. Then PSK modulation follows inverse DFT (IDFT) that gives watermark information as OFDM symbols. These symbols are spread using spreading codes and then arithmetically added to the host image. Finally, scheme applies inverse DCT (IDCT) to get watermarked host images. The simulation results of the proposed scheme are compared with CDMA-based scheme in DCT domain. The results show that the robustness of the proposed scheme is higher than the existing scheme for non-geometric attacks.

Design of robust image watermarking technique based on shearlet transform and QR matrix decomposition

Watermarking is the method by which a watermark image related to the original cover image is embedded into the cover image. Images have become an important part in digital media. Thus it is important to secure the image data and prevent its illegal duplication. Image watermarking aims at serving this purpose. Wavelet technique is commonly used technique to embed watermark on the cover image in transform domain. The watermark data and cover image are not distorted after applying transform; hence this technique is used widely in this field. The upgraded version of wavelet technique is shearlet transform, thus upgraded version improves the presentation of multidimensional data and transform is mainly based on multidirectional and multi-resolution. The shearlet transform overcome the drawback of wavelet’s edge presentation of image which is the main characteristic of shearlet and hence the host image is modelled with different texture. There are two characteristics of watermark, namely, Imperceptibility and robustness. Imperceptibility is achieved using Shearlet transform, whereas robustness and security improvement is achieved using QR decomposition. Analyzing the experiments undergone on the various attack of host image with distinct texture characteristics and thus the result shows that this technique has a good resistance to attacks and provides a efficient transparency and high robustness.

Combined DWT-DISB based image watermarking optimized for decision making problems

Currently, the protection of digital information, especially in the form of multimedia information such as images, video, text, and audio. The digital nature of the multimedia data has made it prone to misuse and attack, such as is of duplication, transformation, modification, and diffusion. In this sense, it is significant to create a system for protecting the intellectual property rights of the multimedia content. The system should guarantee copyright protection, authentication, and protection against duplication of the material. The drastic development in network multimedia system has made the development of these protection systems challenging. Numerous researches have proposed the use of watermarking to address these issues. The watermarking technique obscures vital information in the original multimedia data in which the hidden data is utilized for copyright protection and authentication. The primary need for any watermarking system should be to guarantee robustness against imminent attack while retaining the quality of the watermark images. This research presents a robust image watermarking technique used to hide details of the RGB Color elements. The proposed approach is an integration of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the relatively new dual intermediate significant bit (DISB). The performance evaluation of the proposed approach produced quality watermarked images that are robust. The proposed method has a PSNR of 101.97 and an NCC of 0.9780 which compare considerable well with the individual techniques.

A Robust Multi-Channel Digital Image Watermarking Technique with SVD, DWT, DCT

International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering (A UGC Approved and indexed with DOI, ICI and Approved, DPI Digital Library) is one of the leading and growing open access, peer-reviewed, monthly, and scientific research journal for scientists, engineers, research scholars, and academicians, which gains a foothold in Asia and opens to the world, aims to publish original, theoretical and practical advances in Computer Science,Information Technology, Engineering (Software, Mechanical, Civil, Electronics & Electrical), and all interdisciplinary streams of Computing Sciences. It intends to disseminate original, scientific, theoretical or applied research in the field of Computer Sciences and allied fields. It provides a platform for publishing results and research with a strong empirical component. It aims to bridge the significant gap between research and practice by promoting the publication of original, novel, industry-relevant research.

A FRT - SVD Based Blind Medical Watermarking Technique for Telemedicine Applications

In this article, a blind and robust medical image watermarking technique based on Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is proposed. A host medical image is first transformed into 16 × 16 non-overlapping blocks and then ridgelet transform is applied on the individual blocks to obtain sets of ridgelet coefficients. SVD is then applied on these sets, to obtain the corresponding U, S and V matrix. The watermark information is embedded into the host medical image by modification of the value of the significant elements of U matrix. This proposed technique is tested on various types of medical images such as X-ray and CT scan. The simulation results revealed that this technique provides better imperceptibility, with an average PSNR being 42.95 dB for all test medical images. This technique also overcomes the limitation of the existing technique which is applicable on only the Region of Interest (ROI) of the medical image.

Rotation and scale invariant image watermarking based on polar harmonic transforms

Geometric attacks such as rotation and scale can destroy the synchronization of watermarking, designing a geometric-distortion resilient watermarking is currently a challenging work. In this paper, we propose a robust image watermarking technique based on polar harmonic transforms (PHTs) which are defined in a circle domain. The watermarking embedding process includes three principal steps: Firstly, we explicitly exploit invariant properties of PHTs’ moments to compute orthogonal moment features. Next, according to the order and repetition of PHTs’ moments, steady moments those are not sensitive to geometric attacks are picked out. Finally, watermark embedding is performed through quantization modulation on the selected steady moments, and the watermarked image is reconstructed by combining the original and the compensating image acquired from unmodulated and modulated PHTs’ moments, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking approach is robust to both geometric distortions (rotation and scaling) and general signal processing attacks (Gaussian filtering, median filtering, average filtering, Gaussian noise, salt & pepper noise, speckle noise, JPEG compression, etc.) and outperforms state-of-the-art watermarking methods.

New Rapid and Robust Color Image Watermarking Technique in Spatial Domain

In this paper, a novel spatial domain color image watermarking technique is proposed to rapidly and effectively protect the copyright of the color image. First, the direct current (DC) coefficient of 2D-DFT obtained in the spatial domain is discussed, and the relationship between the change of each pixel in the spatial domain and the change of the DC coefficient in the Fourier transform is proved. Then, the DC coefficient is used to embed and extract watermark in the spatial domain by the proposed quantization technique. The novelties of this paper include three points: 1) the DC coefficient of 2D-DFT is obtained in the spatial domain without of the true 2D-DFT; 2) the relationship between the change of each pixel in the image block and the change of the DC coefficient of 2D-DFT is found, and; 3) the proposed method has the short running time and strong robustness. The experimental results on two publicly available image databases (CVG-UGR and USC-SIPI) have shown that the proposed method not only has satisfied the needs of invisibility but also has better performance in terms of robustness and real-time feature, which show the proposed method has both advantages of spatial domain and frequency domain.

Robust image watermarking technique using support vector regression for blind geometric distortion correction in lifting wavelet transform and singular value decomposition domain

Robust image watermarking technique using support vector regression for blind geometric distortion correction in lifting wavelet transform and singular value decomposition domain

SVM-based robust image watermarking technique in LWT domain using different sub-bands

In this paper, a robust image watermarking system in lifting wavelet transform domain using different sub-bands has been proposed. SVM classifier is used during watermark extraction to obtain improved robustness under diverse attack conditions. In this work, a detailed analysis of imperceptibility and robustness performance with the use of different sub-bands has been presented. The performance on different sub-band has been analyzed so as to maximize the robustness against different attacks keeping imperceptibility at adequate level. Robustness is observed against various attacks such as noising attacks, denoising attacks, image processing attacks, lossy compression attacks and geometric attacks. It is seen that high-frequency sub-band provides better invisibility, whereas variation of robustness performance on different sub-bands depend on the type of attacks. It is observed from the performance analysis that all the attacks do not have exactly same effect on the frequency content of the image. For instance, noising attack affects every frequency component of the image almost equally, whereas the embedding in high-frequency band makes the system fragile to lossy compression attack. The algorithm is tested on a large image database to observe the variation in the performance of the system. Comparative analysis suggests that the proposed sub-band provides improved performance over some benchmark methods in most of the cases.

Hybrid blind robust image watermarking technique based on DFT-DCT and Arnold transform

In this paper, a robust blind image watermarking method is proposed for copyright protection of digital images. This hybrid method relies on combining two well-known transforms that are the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The motivation behind this combination is to enhance the imperceptibility and the robustness. The imperceptibility requirement is achieved by using magnitudes of DFT coefficients while the robustness improvement is ensured by applying DCT to the DFT coefficients magnitude. The watermark is embedded by modifying the coefficients of the middle band of the DCT using a secret key. The security of the proposed method is enhanced by applying Arnold transform (AT) to the watermark before embedding. Experiments were conducted on natural and textured images. Results show that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method is robust to a wide range of attacks while preserving high imperceptibility.

Neural network based robust image watermarking technique in LWT domain

Neural network based robust image watermarking technique in LWT domain

A Robust Image Watermarking Technique Based on DWT, APDCBT, and SVD

Copyright protection for digital multimedia has become a research hotspot in recent years. As an efficient solution, the digital watermarking scheme has emerged at the right moment. In this article, a highly robust and hybrid watermarking method is proposed. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) presented in recent years as well as the singular value decomposition (SVD) are adopted in this method to insert and recover the watermark. To enhance the watermark imperceptibility, the direct current (DC) coefficients after block-based APDCBT in high frequency sub-bands (LH and HL) are modified by using the watermark. Compared with the conventional SVD-based watermarking method and another watermarking technique, the watermarked images obtained by the proposed method have higher image quality. In addition, the proposed method achieves high robustness in resisting various image processing attacks.