Intelligent Watermarking for High-Capacity Low-Distortion Data Embedding

Author(s):  
Frank Y. Shih ◽  
Xin Zhong

Image watermarking intends to hide secret data for the purposes of copyright protection, image authentication, data privacy, and broadcast monitoring. The ultimate goal is to achieve highest embedding capacity and lowest image distortion. In this paper, we present an intelligent watermarking scheme which can automatically analyze an image content to extract significant regions of interest (ROIs). A ROI is an area involving crucial information, and will be kept intact. The remaining regions of non-interest (RONIs) are collated for embedding watermarks, and will be ranked according to their entropy fuzzy memberships into a degree of importance. They are embedded by different amounts of bits to achieve optimal watermarking. The watermark is compressed and embedded in the frequency domain of the image. Experimental results show that the proposed technique has accomplished high capacity, high robustness, and high PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) watermarking.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 2199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Zakaria ◽  
Mehdi Hussain ◽  
Ainuddin Wahab ◽  
Mohd Idris ◽  
Norli Abdullah ◽  
...  

Steganography is the art and practice of communication using hidden messages. The least significant bits (LSB) based method is the well-known type of steganography in the spatial domain. Usually, achieving the larger embedding capacity in LSB-based methods requires a large number of LSB bits modification which indirectly reduces the visual quality of stego-image and increases the risk of steganalysis detection attacks. In this study, we propose a novel steganography method with data mapping strategy which can reduce the number of bits modification per pixel. In the proposed method, four secret data bits are mapped with the four most significant bits of a cover pixel. Furthermore, the only two LSBs of a pixel are modified to indicate the mapping strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to achieve 3.48% larger embedding capacity while enhancing the visual quality (i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) 3.73 dB) and reducing the modification of 0.76 bits per pixel. Moreover, the proposed method provides security against basic Regular and Singular groups (RS) steganalysis and histogram steganalysis detection attacks.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 583
Author(s):  
Chin-Feng Lee ◽  
Jau-Ji Shen ◽  
Somya Agrawal ◽  
Yen-Hsi Li

Data hiding is a technique that embeds a secret message into a cover medium and transfers the hidden information in the secret message to the recipient. In the past, several data hiding methods based on magic matrix have used various geometrical shapes to transmit secret data. The embedding capacity achieved in these methods was often limited due to simple geometrical layouts. This paper proposes a data hiding scheme based on a double-layer octagon-shaped shell matrix. Compared to previous octagon-shaped data hiding methods, the proposed method embeds a total of 7 bits in each pixel pair, reaching an embedding capacity of 3.5 bits per pixel (bpp). Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has a higher embedding capacity compared to other irreversible data hiding schemes. Using the proposed method, it is possible to maintain the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) within an acceptable range with the embedding time less than 2 s.


Cryptography ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 480-497
Author(s):  
Lin Gao ◽  
Tiegang Gao ◽  
Jie Zhao

This paper proposed a reversible medical image watermarking scheme using Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) and sub-sample. To meet the highly demand of the perceptional quality, the proposed scheme embedding the watermark by modifying the RDWT coefficients. The sub-sample scheme is introduced to the proposed scheme for the enhancement of the embedding capacity. Moreover, to meet the need of security, a PWLCM based image encryption algorithm is introduced for encrypting the image after the watermark embedding. The experimental results suggests that the proposed scheme not only meet the highly demand of the perceptional quality, but also have better embedding capacity than former DWT based scheme. Also the encryption scheme could protect the image contents efficiently.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5540
Author(s):  
Nayeem Hasan ◽  
Md Saiful Islam ◽  
Wenyu Chen ◽  
Muhammad Ashad Kabir ◽  
Saad Al-Ahmadi

This paper proposes an encryption-based image watermarking scheme using a combination of second-level discrete wavelet transform (2DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) with an auto extraction feature. The 2DWT has been selected based on the analysis of the trade-off between imperceptibility of the watermark and embedding capacity at various levels of decomposition. DCT operation is applied to the selected area to gather the image coefficients into a single vector using a zig-zig operation. We have utilized the same random bit sequence as the watermark and seed for the embedding zone coefficient. The quality of the reconstructed image was measured according to bit correction rate, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and similarity index. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is highly robust under different types of image-processing attacks. Several image attacks, e.g., JPEG compression, filtering, noise addition, cropping, sharpening, and bit-plane removal, were examined on watermarked images, and the results of our proposed method outstripped existing methods, especially in terms of the bit correction ratio (100%), which is a measure of bit restoration. The results were also highly satisfactory in terms of the quality of the reconstructed image, which demonstrated high imperceptibility in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR ≥ 40 dB) and structural similarity (SSIM ≥ 0.9) under different image attacks.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-55
Author(s):  
Lin Gao ◽  
Tiegang Gao ◽  
Jie Zhao ◽  
Yonglei Liu

This article proposed a reversible digital image watermarking scheme using PVO and Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT). The PVO was introduce to the proposed scheme to enhance the embedding capacity. By embedding the watermark in the RDWT coefficients, the proposed scheme exploited the visual masking property of RDWT to achieve better visual quality. Also, the proposed scheme has better performance on embedding capacity because the RDWT has several sub-band coefficients for embedding. The experimental results on natural and medical images suggests that the proposed scheme could meet the demand of perceptional quality with better embedding capacity than former schemes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Gao ◽  
Tiegang Gao ◽  
Jie Zhao

This paper proposed a reversible medical image watermarking scheme using Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) and sub-sample. To meet the highly demand of the perceptional quality, the proposed scheme embedding the watermark by modifying the RDWT coefficients. The sub-sample scheme is introduced to the proposed scheme for the enhancement of the embedding capacity. Moreover, to meet the need of security, a PWLCM based image encryption algorithm is introduced for encrypting the image after the watermark embedding. The experimental results suggests that the proposed scheme not only meet the highly demand of the perceptional quality, but also have better embedding capacity than former DWT based scheme. Also the encryption scheme could protect the image contents efficiently.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (08) ◽  
pp. 1650091 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geeta Kasana ◽  
Kulbir Singh ◽  
Satvinder Singh Bhatia

This paper proposes a block-based high capacity steganography technique for digital images. The cover image is decomposed into blocks of equal size and the largest pixel of each block is found to embed the secret data bits and also the smallest pixel of each block is used for embedding to enhance the capacity. Embedding of secret data is performed using the concept that the pixel of a cover image has only two states — even and odd. Multilevel approach is also combined in the proposed technique to achieve high embedding capacity. In order to make the proposed technique more secure, a key is generated using embedding levels, block size, pixel embedding way, encryption parameters, and starting blocks of each embedding levels. Embedding capacity and visual quality of stego images generated by the proposed steganography technique are higher than the existing techniques. Steganalysis tests have been performed to show the un-detectability and imperceptibility of the proposed technique.


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