Secure and robust host-adapted color image watermarking using inter-layered wavelet-packets

This work presents a secure and robust color image watermarking for copyright protection applications, that is based on exploiting the multi-spectral properties of the primary color components of the RGB image. The proposed scheme employs the interconnection between the subbands of the primary color components in the wavelet-packet domain. The scheme is constructed to be adaptive, in the sense that the watermark bits are embedded in safe locations, depending on the inter-layer energy of coefficients in the wavelet-packets. The scheme immunity to attacks is improved by applying a two-level security procedure. To validate the high performance of the proposed scheme, several experimental tests were conducted and a comparative analysis was provided. The obtained results have shown improved watermarking robustness against a wide range of attacks while preserving a high watermarking imperceptibility.