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.     

PCA-DTT 2D-DHCES based attack resilient imperceptible image watermarking

Most schemes exhibit low robustness due to LSB’s (Least Significant Bit) and MSB’s (Most Significant Bit) based information hiding in the cover image. However, most of these IW schemes have low imperceptibility as the cover image distortion reveals to the attacker due to information hiding in MSB’s. In this paper, a hybrid image watermarking scheme is proposed based on integrating Robust Principal Component Analysis (R-PCA), Discrete Tchebichef Transform (DTT), and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). A grayscale watermark image is twisted/scrambled using a 2D Discrete Hyper-chaotic Encryption System (2D-DHCES) to boost up the robustness/heftiness and security. The original cover image is crumbled into sparse components using R-PCA and using DTT the substantial component is additionally decomposed and the watermark will be embedded in the cover image using SVD processing. In DTT, scarcer coefficients hold the utmost energy, also provide an optimum sparse depiction of the substantial image edges and features that supports proficient retrieval of the watermark image even after unadorned image distortion based channel attacks. The imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed method are corroborated against a variety of signal processing channel attacks (salt and pepper noise, multi-directional shearing, cropping, and frequency filtering, etc.). The visual and quantifiable outcomes reveal that the proposed image watermarking scheme is much effective and delivers high forbearance against several image processing and geometric attacks.

     

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.     

Rightful ownership through image adaptive DWT-SVD watermarking algorithm and perceptual tweaking

In this paper, a tailored blended image adaptive watermarking scheme has been presented, which is based on DWT and SVD. Through this paper an attempt has been made to solve the problem of false positive while maintaining the robustness and imperceptibility with the help of principal component and perceptual tuning of the image. Perceptual tuning is a non-blind technique and based on the objective quality of image. The embedding strength is made dependent on watermark features as well as of host in wavelet domain by using tuning parameter which is user specific. The idea of embedding the principal component of intermediate frequency sub-bands of watermark image into singular values of perceptually tuned intermediate frequency sub-bands of host image have been exploited. The proposed algorithm is providing the adaptive behavior towards the image content for perceptual transparency and at the same time avoiding the possibility of false watermark extraction well supported by a private key, which is necessary at the time of extraction. Thus the proposed watermarking algorithm is a kind of non-blind, image adaptive and suitable for rightful ownership. Various comparative results make the algorithm superior in terms of intentional and non-intentional attacks. Also the algorithm is strong against the print and scan attack.     

A robust watermarking scheme using phase shift keying with the combination of amplitude boost and low amplitude block selection

Watermarking is a potential method for copyright protection and authentication of multimedia data in the internet. The watermarking process can be viewed as a communication task, where the watermark acting like information is embedded into a host image acting like noise in a communication channel which is susceptible to all kinds of attacks acting like jamming. In a previous paper, we proposed a robust watermarking scheme using frequency shift keying (FSK). In the scheme, high-variance block selection (HVBS) is employed to enhance robustness. In this paper, a novel watermarking scheme using phase shift keying (PSK) modulation with amplitude boost (AB) and low amplitude block selection (LABS) is proposed. AB is hired to increase the robustness while LABS is employed to improve the imperceptibility. With proper combination of AB and LABS, the proposed scheme achieves superior performance in terms of robustness and imperceptibility.In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, simulations under various conditions were conducted. The empirical results showed that QPSK is the best choice among other PSKs and the proposed scheme can sustain most common attacks including JPEG compression, rotating, resizing, cropping, painting, noising and blurring etc. The empirical results also showed that the scheme with AB and LABS properly combined outperforms the scheme without. The gain of the former over the latter is more significant for host images with smooth characteristics than those with high-frequency characteristics. Simulation comparison with two other schemes (the Hsu's scheme and the Chen's scheme) showed that the proposed scheme is the most robust among the three.     

Imperceptible digital watermarking scheme in multiple transform domains

A novel imperceptible digital watermarking scheme in multiple transform domains is presented, where the cover image is dealt with by discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete fractional random transform (DFRNT), while the watermark image is scrambled by Arnold transform and logistic map. First the watermark is scrambled by the Arnold transform, then the row and the column of the resulting watermark are scrambled by the Logistic map, respectively. In addition, four sub-band images are generated from the host image by the two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform. The low-frequency sub-band images are divided into 8?×?8 small matrices, and a coefficient matrix is produced by performing the discrete cosine transform on each matrix. An intermediate matrix with the same size as the watermark image is constructed by the intermediate frequency coefficients. Then the discrete fractional random transformation is performed on the intermediate frequency coefficient matrix and the scrambled watermark is embedded into the discrete fractional random transformation domain. Compared with the previous schemes, the proposed digital watermarking scheme has stronger imperceptibility and robustness.     

A new robust and secure digital image watermarking scheme based on the integer wavelet transform and singular value decomposition

In this paper, a new robust and secure digital image watermarking scheme that can be used for copyright protection is proposed. The scheme uses the integer wavelet transform (IWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The grey image watermark pixels values are embedded directly into the singular values of the 1-level IWT decomposed sub-bands. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of robustness, imperceptibility and capacity due to the IWT and SVD properties. A challenge due to the false positive problem which may be faced by most of SVD-based watermarking schemes has been solved in this work by adopting a digital signature into the watermarked image. The proposed digital signature mechanism is applied to generate and embed a digital signature after embedding the watermarks; the ownership is then authenticated before extracting watermarks. Thus, the proposed scheme achieved the security issue where the false positive problem is solved, in addition to that, the scheme is considered as a blind scheme. A computer simulation is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme and its robustness against various types of attacks and to compare it with some previous schemes. Furthermore, the statistical Wilcoxon signed rank test is employed to certify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

基于Hilbert扫描和SVD的小波域图像水印算法

为了提高水印的安全性、鲁棒性和不可见性,提出了一种基于Hilbert扫描和SVD（Singular Value Decomposition,奇异值分解）的小波域图像水印技术。算法以一幅有意义的二值水印图像为水印信号。首先对原始图像进行一层小波变换,对低频分量进行图像分块,并对每一个图像块进行SVD。利用了SVD的单向非对称性和正交矩阵的性质,给出了一种自适应水印方案。同时,利用了Hilbert扫描能很好地保持图像空间局部连接性的特点。然后,利用图像的局部统计特征自适应地修改阈值,利用两个阈值严格控制系数的修改程度,使算法达到不可见性和鲁棒性之间的最优平衡。水印的提取无需原始图像的参与,达到了真正的盲水印。实验结果表明,该算法是有效的,对常见的图像处理操作具有较强的鲁棒性。     

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.     

Adaptive and blind watermarking scheme based on optimal SVD blocks selection

To protect the ownership of the digital products, a novel adaptive and blind watermarking scheme is designed. Firstly, the underlying reason of image quality degradation in singular value decomposition (SVD)-based watermarking scheme is analyzed and the potential scenario causing visible destroy is pointed out. Then the optimal SVD blocks selection strategy is proposed to improve the imperceptibility. Different from other block selection rules devised by subjective evaluation means, our selection rule aims to retain the image quality as much as possible from the source. Furthermore, information entropy is utilized to achieve the purpose of adaptive embedding. In the experiment, the proposed watermarking scheme is tested under several attacks, such as noise attack, JPEG compression, blurring, sharping, and etc. Finally, the proposed watermarking scheme is compared with other existing schemes, and the experimental results demonstrate the robustness, imperceptibility and superior of the proposed watermarking scheme.

     

基于图像特征的小波域自适应水印算法

提出了一种基于图像特征的小波域自适应水印算法。该算法选用有意义二值图像为水印,把宿主图像分成互不重叠的图像块,用分数盒维数分析各块的特征,提取特征块和次特征块,对它们分别进行一级小波分解,先将水印以不同强度自适应地嵌入到特征块的小波域低频子图中,在保证隐蔽性的前提下,再次将水印以不同强度自适应地嵌入到次特征块的小波域低频子图中,该算法较好地实现了水印的隐蔽性和稳健性。为增强水印的安全性和稳健性,在嵌入前利用Arnold迭代变换将水印置乱。实验结果表明,该算法对JPEG压缩、加噪、剪切、滤波等具有较强的稳健性。     

基于DWT-SVD域的彩色图像自适应水印算法

为了保护数字彩色图像版权,提出了一种结合离散小波变换(DWT)和矩阵奇异值分解(SVD)的彩色图像自适应水印算法。其主要设计思想是:先将原RGB彩色图像的各颜色分量进行小波分解;再将得到的中、低频带的小波系数与原水印图像分别进行奇异值分解,水印信息的奇异值重复嵌入到三通道中、低频带的小波系数奇异值中,且利用临界视觉阈值与奇异值之间的关系对水印嵌入强度作自适应调节,从而达到增强水印鲁棒性和确保水印透明性的目的。本算法适用于二值及灰度水印,在二值水印的提取过程中需设定一个提取阈值,以保证提取水印的完整性。仿真结果说明本算法对水印系统的透明性与鲁棒性作了较好的协调,是一种较稳健的算法。     

Hybrid robust watermarking for color images

In this paper, we present a blind and highly robust watermarking scheme method for color images by combining the advantages of both spatial and frequency domain. Watermark is generated for each channel (RGB) of the color image by extracting spatial domain features using Gray Level Co-occurence Matrix as well as a unique identification number. The watermark is embedded in Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based less correlated low and high frequency sub bands in such a way that the perceptual quality of the image is preserved. Imperceptibility is achieved by embedding the watermark in less correlated sub bands and robustness is achieved by spreading the watermark using Laplacian Pyramid in contourlet transform. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can survive various image processing and signal processing attacks. The proposed method achieves high transparency, imperceptibility and robustness compared to some of the existing schemes.     

A new watermarking scheme for colour image using QR decomposition and ternary coding

At present, the binary images are often used as the original watermark images of many watermarking methods, but partial methods cannot be easily extended to colour image watermarking methods. For resolving this problem, we propose a new watermarking method using ternary coding and QR decomposition for colour image. In the procedure of embedding watermark, the colour image watermark is coded to ternary information; the colour host image is also separated into image blocks of sized 3?×?3, and these image blocks are further decomposed via QR decomposition; then, one ternary watermark is embedded into one orthogonal matrix Q of QR decomposition by the proposed rules. In the procedure of extracting watermark, the proposed method uses the blind-manner to extract the embedded ternary information. The novelty of this scheme lies in the proposed ternary coding for watermark image, which can improve the imperceptibility, embedded watermark capacity and real-time feature of the watermarking scheme. The results of simulation show the presented technique is better than other compared schemes with respect to imperceptibility, embedded watermark capacity and real-time feature under the similar robustness.

     

SVM based robust watermarking for enhanced medical image security

Medical images are more typical than any other ordinary images, since it stores patient’s information for diagnosis purpose. Such images need more security and confidentiality as total diagnosis depends on it. In telemedicine applications, transmission of medical image via open channel, demands strong security and copyright protection. In our proposed robust watermarking model, a double layer security is introduced to ensure the robustness of embedded data. The embedded data is scrambled using a unique key and then a transform domain based hybrid watermarking technique is used to embed the scrambled data into the transform coefficients of the host image. The data embedding in medical images involves more attention, so that the diagnosis part must not be affected by any modification. Therefore, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as a classifier, which classify a medical image into two regions i.e. Non Region of Interest (NROI) and Region of Interest (ROI) to embed watermark data into the NROI part of the medical image, using the proposed embedding algorithm. The objective of the proposed model is to avoid any quality degradation to the medical image. The simulation is performed to measure the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) for imperceptibility and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) to test the robustness. The experimented result shows, robustness and imperceptibility with SSIM of more than 0.50 and PSNR of more than 35 dB for proposed watermarking model.

     

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.     

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.     

基于DWT-SVD和Fibonacci变换的彩色图像盲水印算法

为提高水印鲁棒性,将离散小波变换(DWT)、奇异值分解(SVD)和斐波纳契(Fibonacci)变换结合,提出一种新的算法。首先,用Fibonacci变换对拟嵌入的水印进行置乱处理;然后,对宿主彩色图像R、G、B三个分量进行二级小波变换和基于4×4分块的奇异值分解,并用混沌序列选择若干对子块;最后,根据人类视觉系统(HVS)特性对三个分量分配嵌入量、确定嵌入强度,并通过修改每对子块最大奇异值来实现水印嵌入。实验结果表明本方案具有良好的水印不可见性和鲁棒性。     

一种改进的魔方数字水印算法研究

为了提高数字水印算法的安全性和鲁棒性,在研究了各种常见的水印算法优缺点的基础上,提出了一种改进的基于魔方概念的数字水印算法。首先通过魔方混沌算法将原始水印转化为噪声信号,以提高水印安全性。再结合离散余弦变换(DCT)、离散小波变换(DWT)和矩阵奇异值分解(SVD)嵌入水印,以提高水印的不可见性和鲁棒性。实验结果表明,在确保不可见性的基础上,水印信息在噪声干扰、图像处理、图像压缩下具有很好的鲁棒性。     

一种DCT域的最优均值量化盲图像水印算法

针对常规的图像水印算法不能很好地实现水印不可感知性和鲁棒性折中的问题,给出了一种最优均值量化盲水印算法.该算法首先对水印图像进行Arnold置乱,提高了水印的安全性;然后将载体图像进行8×8分块DCT(离散余弦变换),并根据均值量化原理将置乱后的水印嵌入到局部量化噪声值最小的图像子块中,提高了水印的不可感知性;最后水印提取时可以实现盲提取.实验结果表明,该算法对加噪、剪切、JPEG压缩、滤波等多种攻击都具有很强的鲁棒性.