A new digital image watermarking using optimal embedding weights

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Shahdoosti, Hamid Reza^{; *} | Salehi, Mohammad

Affiliations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Hamedan University of Technology, Hamedan, Iran

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Hamid Reza Shahdoosti, Department of Electrical Engineering, Hamedan University of Technology, Hamedan 65155, Iran. Tel.: +98 8138411410; Fax: +98 8138380520; E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: This paper presents a novel transform based watermarking approach using the ridgelet transform for image decomposition. This method embeds the watermark into the Fourier amplitudes of the ridgelet coefficients of the host image. The embedding weights are calculated such that the perceptual transparency is maintained and the robustness against different attacks is guaranteed. The proposed method forms a trade off function considering the similarity between the coefficients of watermarked image and those of the original image, and robustness against different attacks. The ridgelet coefficients of the watermarked image can be obtained by the minimization of this function. Experimental results demonstrate that the newly proposed method performs well in terms of perceptual transparency, and outperforms several state of the art schemes in terms of robustness against common image processing operations and most of the geometric attacks.

Keywords: Image watermarking, trade off function, perceptual transparency, Frobenius norm

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-17951

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 4355-4366, 2018