Secured and Optimized Robust Image Watermarking Scheme

Abstract

The proposed study investigates the robust watermarking techniques and proposes an improved version of robust watermarking scheme. In order to ensure high value of robustness, capacity and imperceptibility of the proposed scheme, the watermark embedding is done in the IWT-transformed domain using the singular values of each band. Along with that, an improved signature insertion methodology is also proposed to make the scheme free from security errors. The third level of LL band is utilized for signature insertion as this minimizes the variation of extracted signature bits from the actual signature bits after attacks. Further, the embedding strengths of the embedding are also optimized with the help of artificial bee colony, which optimized the robustness and imperceptibility of proposed scheme. The comparative analysis of proposed scheme is also provided with the schemes proposed in recent past, and the comparison further supports the claim of better performance.