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.     

Attack resistant watermarking technique based on fast curvelet transform and Robust Principal Component Analysis

Watermarking is a technique which embeds the copyright information/identifier to provide authenticity in robust and imperceptible manner. In this paper, a hybrid watermarking technique is proposed based on combination of Fast Curvelet Tansform (FCT), Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The gray-scale watermark logo is scrambled using Generalized Arnold Transform (GAT) to enhance the robustness and security. The original image is decomposed to low rank and sparse components using RPCA; the curvelet coefficients are obtained using FCT via Unequally-Spaced Fast Fourier Transforms (USFFT) to embed the processed watermark using SVD into the color image. In curvelet transform, fewer coefficients contain the most energy, also giving optimally sparse representation of the significant image features and edges that helps in efficient recovery of the embedded watermark even after severe image degradation. The robustness and imperceptibility of the proposed technique is verified against a variety of processing operations (noise, filtering) and geometric attacks (crop, resize, projection etc.). The quantitative and visual results reveal that the watermarking technique proposed is more efficient and provides high tolerance against different geometric and image processing attacks.     

Genetic perceptual shaping: Utilizing cover image and conceivable attack information during watermark embedding

We describe a new watermarking scheme based on intelligent shaping of a digital watermark using Genetic Programming (GP). The proposed method, in addition to achieving a superior tradeoff between watermark robustness and imperceptibility, is also able to structure the watermark in accordance with an anticipated attack. This has been achieved by simultaneously hiding the watermark as well as spreading and fusing it in such a way to resist the conceivable attack. Robustness versus imperceptibility tradeoff and increase in bit correct ratio after attack, have been employed as the optimization criteria in the GP search. The concept of bonus fitness has been used to implement multi-objective fitness based GP evolution. Experiments on standard images indicate that such watermark shaping functions could be developed that are cover image independent and enhance imperceptibility. They offer high resistance against removal and interference attacks of Checkmark benchmark.     

A novel hybrid of DCT and SVD in DWT domain for robust and invisible blind image watermarking with optimal embedding strength

To optimize the tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness properties, this paper proposes a robust and invisible blind image watermarking scheme based on a new combination of discrete cosine transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) in discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain using least-square curve fitting and logistic chaotic map. Firstly cover image is decomposed into four subbands using DWT and the low frequency subband LL is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks. Then DCT is applied to each block and several particular middle frequency DCT coefficients are extracted to form a modulation matrix, which is used to embed watermark signal by modifying its largest singular values in SVD domain. Optimal embedding strength for a specific cover image is obtained from an estimation based on least-square curve fitting and provides a good compromise between transparency and robustness of watermarking scheme. The security of the watermarking scheme is ensured by logistic chaotic map. Experimental results demonstrate the better effectiveness of the proposed watermarking scheme in the perceptual quality and the ability of resisting to conventional signal processing and geometric attacks, in comparison with the related existing methods.     

DWT-SVD and DCT based robust and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection

In this article, a new DWT-SVD and DCT with Arnold Cat Map encryption based robust and blind watermarking scheme is proposed for copyright protection. The proposed scheme solves the most frequently occurring watermarking security problems in Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based schemes which are unauthorized reading and false-positive detection. This scheme also optimizes fidelity and robustness characteristics. The grey image watermark splits into two parts using four bits MSBs and four bits LSBs of each pixel. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of these MSBs and LSBs values are embedded into the middle singular value of each block having size 4 × 4 of the host image’s one level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) sub-bands. The reason for incorporating Arnold Cat Map in the proposed scheme is to encode the watermark image before embedding it in the host image. The proposed scheme is a blind scheme and does not require the choice of scaling factor. Thus, the proposed scheme is secure as well as free from the false positive detection problem. The proposed watermarking scheme is tested for various malicious and non-malicious attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the scheme is robust, imperceptible and secure to several attacks and common signal processing operations.     

Adaptive image data hiding using transformation and error replacement

Watermarking is popular method for effective copyright protection of digital data. The invisible image watermarking is a type of watermarking which is used to conceal secret information in a cover image. In any watermarking system, there is a trade-off between imperceptibility and payload of the data to be hidden in the cover medium. Therefore, only a limited amount of data can be concealed in the cover image while watermark remain imperceptible. This paper proposes a new method of adaptive blind digital image data hiding in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain using Minimum Error Lease Significant Bit Replacement (MELSBR) method and Genetic Algorithm (GA). In the proposed method, the secret image is embedded into the DCT transformed cover image. Initially, the host and the secret image both are partitioned into equal sized blocks. Then for each secret image block, host image block is intelligently selected through GA and is embedded using MELSBR method. GA helps in identifying the target cover image blocks such that with the LSB embedding, both visual quality of the cover image and imperceptibility of the secret image remain least affected. In watermark extraction process, the watermarked image is decomposed into equal sized blocks and then using the Jigsaw Puzzle Solver (JPS) the secret image is reconstructed. In spite of doubling the payload of the data to hide, the experimental results have shown better imperceptibility and robustness results of the proposed method as compared to the current approaches in this domain.     

基于离散小波—奇异值分解的多水印嵌入算法

为提高传统数字图像水印算法的安全性, 解决数字水印对信号处理和几何失真比较敏感的问题, 提出一种新的以离散小波多级分解与奇异值分解相结合的数字图像水印算法. 不同于常见的基于小波变换的数字水印技术, 该方案在原始图像离散小波变换的低频近似区域和高频对角区域中嵌入水印, 在图像的保真度和鲁棒性之间取得较好的折衷. 水印检测时, 将从低频近似区域和高频对角区域中提取出的水印进行比较, 选择效果较好的水印作为最终检测水印. 实验结果表明, 提出的多水印算法对于各种攻击具有较强的鲁棒性.     

基于奇异值分解的双重变换域图像水印算法

提出了一种基于奇异值分解的离散小波和离散余弦双重变换域数字图像水印算法。仿真结果表明,该算法不仅具有较好的水印不可见性,而且对常规攻击和几何攻击都具有较好的鲁棒性,且该算法采用灰度图像作为水印,增加了嵌入的信息量,在版权保护方面具有一定的应用价值。     

A robust semi-blind watermarking for color images based on multiple decompositions

In this paper, a robust semi-blind watermarking scheme for color images, based on multiple decompositions is proposed to preserve the copyrights of the owner. Using multiple decompositions, the gray watermark is embedded into a host color image. Prior to that, to enhance security the gray watermark is encrypted with Arnold transform and SVD by generating secret keys. The luminance component of the given host image is subjected to discrete wavelet transform(DWT), contourlet transform(CT), Schur decomposition and singular value decomposition(SVD) in sequence and finally the watermark is embedded. In the semi-blind extraction process, the watermark is extracted without the help of the original host image. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme has better visual imperceptibility and high robustness against image & signal processing attacks compared to other methods.     

A novel DCT domain CRT-based watermarking scheme for image authentication surviving JPEG compression

Digital watermarking techniques have been proposed for copyright protection and authentication of multimedia data. In this paper, we propose a novel Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based technique for digital watermarking in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain that is robust to several common attacks. We compared the performance of the proposed technique with recently proposed Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based and spatial CRT-based watermarking schemes. Experimental results have shown that the proposed technique successfully makes the watermark perceptually invisible and has better robustness to common image manipulation techniques such as JPEG compression, brightening and sharpening effects compared to the spatial domain-based CRT scheme. The proposed scheme is able to achieve a Tamper Assessment Function (TAF) value of less than 10% when the watermarked image undergoes JPEG compression between a range of 50 to 70%, where as, the spatial CRT-based scheme produce TAF value of more than 35% and the SVD-based scheme produces TAF value between 10 to 40% depending on the host image, for the same range of compression. When the watermark capacity is doubled, the proposed technique is still able to maintain imperceptibility and low TAF values, for most of the attacks.     

A semi-oblivious energy-aware adaptive watermarking for wireless image sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a semi-oblivious energy-aware adaptive watermarking scheme for wireless image sensor networks, which considered key characteristics such as the embedding capacity, security, imperceptibility, computation, and communication energy requirements. We evaluated the distortion in cover image due to watermark redundancies, the number of embedding locations with respect to two channel adaptive parameters, and the impact of compression of cover image on the correctness of extracted watermark. In addition, we investigated the robustness of the scheme against statistical analysis attacks. The results have shown that the proposed scheme has sufficient capacity to embed redundant watermarks in the cover image in an imperceptible manner with reasonably low distortion. The scheme is also considered relatively robust against collusion and middleman attacks.     

基于CL多小波变换和组合位平面理论的秘密信息共享算法

针对信息隐藏算法容量和不可见性与鲁棒性矛盾的特点,提出了一种新的基于Chui-Lian(CL)多小波变换和组合位平面(CBP)理论的数字图像载体预处理算法,并将该算法用于以数字图像为载体的信息隐藏,以实现秘密通信和图像共享。其中,CL多小波变换能够将载体图像划分为4个能量等级不同的最低分辨率子图像,组合位平面理论可将子图像解析为不同的位平面层次,在隐藏秘密信息时,可根据最低分辨率子图和组合位平面的能量等级由高到低分别嵌入鲁棒信息、秘密信息和脆弱信息。实验结果表明,在25%的嵌入率时,与基于离散余弦变换和最低有效位方法的信息隐藏算法（DCT-LSB）、基于离散小波变换和最低有效位方法的信息隐藏算法（DWT-LSB）相比,所提算法针对若干常见攻击的鲁棒性有一定程度提升,峰值信噪比（PSNR）分别提高了37.16%和20.00%。     

Adaptive color image watermarking by the use of quaternion image moments

The first adaptive moment-based color image watermarking is presented in this work. The proposed method exploits rotation invariance, high reconstruction capability and computation accuracy of the quaternion radial moments’ (QRMs), subject to the tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility. The current system manages to multi-embed binary logos to color images applying QRMs as information carriers. A novel adaptive system adjusts the watermark’s embedding strength (online) by taking into account image’s morphology, with respect to robustness and imperceptibility. The method manages to experimentally justify and further eliminate the attack-free phenomenon that state-of-the-art methods suffer. The simulation results justified that the proposed framework manages to highly secure its carrying information under common signal processing and geometric attacking conditions. Furthermore, the adoption of the novel adaptive process enhances the robustness and imperceptibility requirements by reducing the Bit Error Rate even by 49% and producing even 5db higher PSNR values, respectively.     

基于小波视觉模型的乘性水印算法

虽然小波域加性水印算法具有较好的不可感知性,但其鲁棒性较弱。因此,结合小波域视觉模型,提出了一种基于小波视觉模型的乘性图像水印算法。在水印嵌入过程中,为平衡水印的不可感知性和鲁棒性,以中频子带作为水印嵌入空间,并根据图像的频域敏感度、亮度敏感度、纹理复杂度确定水印的嵌入强度。在水印检测过程中,采用广义高斯分布(GGD)对小波系数的统计特性进行刻画,并通过奈曼-皮尔逊(NP)准则确定水印系统的检测阈值,给出了水印系统的虚警概率和检测概率之间的接收者操作特征(ROC)曲线关系。最后通过实验测试了该算法在抗压缩、叠加噪声、缩放和剪切等攻击时的鲁棒性能。仿真结果表明：该算法具有较好的检测性能以及在抗攻击时具有较强的鲁棒性。     

Improving digital image watermarking by means of optimal channel selection

Supporting safe and resilient authentication and integrity of digital images is of critical importance in a time of enormous creation and sharing of these contents. This paper presents an improved digital image watermarking model based on a coefficient quantization technique that intelligently encodes the owner’s information for each color channel to improve imperceptibility and robustness of the hidden information. Concretely, a novel color channel selection mechanism automatically selects the optimal HL4 and LH4 wavelet coefficient blocks for embedding binary bits by adjusting block differences, calculated between LH and HL coefficients of the host image. The channel selection aims to minimize the visual difference between the original image and the embedded image. On the other hand, the strength of the watermark is controlled by a factor to achieve an acceptable tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility. The arrangement of the watermark pixels before shuffling and the channel into which each pixel is embedded is ciphered in an associated key. This key is utterly required to recover the original watermark, which is extracted through an adaptive clustering thresholding mechanism based on the Otsu’s algorithm. Benchmark results prove the model to support imperceptible watermarking as well as high robustness against common attacks in image processing, including geometric, non-geometric transformations, and lossy JPEG compression. The proposed method enhances more than 4 dB in the watermarked image quality and significantly reduces Bit Error Rate in the comparison of state-of-the-art approaches.     

基于人类视觉系统的数字图像水印方法

基于人类视觉系统(HVS)提出一种可有效平衡数字水印鲁棒性和不可见性的方法。利用基于矩的图像归一化技术将载体图像映射到几何不变空间内,并结合不变质心理论在归一化图像中确定重要区域。根据人眼视觉系统掩蔽特性将一个大小为256 bit的可读水印自适应地嵌入到重要区域的离散傅里叶变换(DFT)域内,同时采用预失真补偿策略弥补图像归一化误差较大的缺陷。仿真实验结果表明,该算法不仅具有良好的透明性,而且对常规信号处理和大部分几何攻击均具有较强的鲁棒性。     

An efficient and robust watermarking approach based on single value decompression,multi-level DWT,and wavelet fusion with scrambled medical images

This paper offers a medical image watermarking approach based on Wavelet Fusion (WF), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and Multi-Level Discrete Wavelet Transform (M-DWT) with scrambling techniques for securing the watermarks images. The proposed approach can be used for providing multi-level security in various applications such as military, copyright protection, and telemedicine systems. The key idea of the projected approach is to first combine two digital watermark images into a single fused watermark to increase the embedded information payload. Then, the fused watermark is scrambled using Arnold and Chaotic algorithms. Finally, the scrambled fused watermark is embedded in the cover image using the SVD and three-level DWT algorithms. The selection of the Arnold and chaotic for watermark encryption is attributed to confirm robustness which resists several types of multimedia attacks and upturn the security level. This paper also presents a comparative study of the proposed approach for different digital images to determine its robustness and stability. Several simulation results reveal that the proposed system improves the capacity and security of embedded medical watermarks without affecting the cover image quality. In conclusion, the proposed approach achieved not only precise acceptable perceptual quality with admired Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values but similarly high Correlation Coefficient (Cr) and SSIM values in the existence of severe attacks.

     

Chaotic based secure watermarking approach for medical images

In this paper, a chaotic based secure medical image watermarking approach is proposed. The method is using non sub-sampled contourlet transform (NSCT), redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) to provide significant improvement in imperceptibility and robustness. Further, security of the approach is ensured by applying 2-D logistic map based chaotic encryption on watermarked medical image. In our approach, the cover image is initially divided into sub-images and NSCT is applied on the sub-image having maximum entropy. Subsequently, RDWT is applied to NSCT image and the singular vector of the RDWT coefficient is calculated. Similar procedure is followed for both watermark images. The singular value of both watermarks is embedded into the singular matrix of the cover. Experimental evaluation shows when the approach is subjected to attacks, using combination of NSCT, RDWT, SVD and chaotic encryption it makes the approach robust, imperceptible, secure and suitable for medical applications.

     

基于直方图调整的抗几何攻击图像水印

几何攻击被公认为是数字图像水印技术走上商用的瓶颈之一。本文根据图像几何变换过程中灰度值统计特征的稳定性原理,提出了一种基于直方图调整的抗几何攻击数字图像水印算法。首先根据图像灰度均值选取一个灰度区间,然后通过调整位于该灰度区间内的图像直方图来嵌入水印信息。在提取水印时无需提供原始图像,实现盲检测。实验结果表明本算法不仅具有很好的隐蔽性,而且对诸如旋转、缩放、平移、仿射变换、剪切等几何攻击和常规信号处理均具有很强的鲁棒性。     

基于DWT-SVD域的图像水印算法

离散小波变换和奇异值分解都可以作为数字水印算法有效的工具,提出一种基于离散小波变换和奇异值分解的数字水印算法.此算法先将整个图像分成4个区域,然后再对每个区域运用奇异值分解方法,通过修改奇异值来嵌入水印信息.实验结果表明,该算法具有很好的稳健性,在经过一般的信号处理操作后,嵌入的水印能被可靠地提取和检测.