An adaptive color image watermarking using RDWT-SVD and artificial bee colony based quality metric strength factor optimization

Image watermarking has emerged as a useful method for solving security issues like authenticity, copyright protection and rightful ownership of digital data. Existing watermarking schemes use either a binary or grayscale image as a watermark. This paper proposes a new robust and adaptive watermarking scheme in which both the host and watermark are the color images of the same size and dimension. The security of the proposed watermarking scheme is enhanced by scrambling both color host and watermark images using Arnold chaotic map. The host image is decomposed by redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) into four sub-bands of the same dimension, and then approximate sub-band undergoes singular value decomposition (SVD) to obtain the principal component (PC). The scrambled watermark is then directly inserted into a principal component of scrambled host image, using an artificial bee colony optimized adaptive multi-scaling factor, obtained by considering both the host and watermark image perceptual quality to overcome the tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness of the watermarked image. The hybridization of RDWT-SVD provides an advantage of no shift-invariant to achieve higher embedding capacity in the host image and preserving the imperceptibility and robustness by exploiting SVD properties. To measure the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed scheme, both qualitative and quantitative evaluation parameters like peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index metric (SSIM) and normalized cross-correlation (NC) are used. Experiments are performed against several image processing attacks and the results are analyzed and compared with other related existing watermarking schemes which clearly depict the usefulness of the proposed scheme. At the same time, the proposed scheme overcomes the major security problem of false positive error (FPE) that mostly occurs in existing SVD based watermarking schemes.