Title
Improving digital image watermarking by means of optimal channel selection.
Abstract
Novel digital image watermarking method using a wavelet-based quantization approach.Optimal color channel selection scheme for the embedding.Otsu's classification-based adaptive threshold for the extraction process.Outperformance of imperceptibility and robustness to state-of-the-art techniques. Supporting safe and resilient authentication and integrity of digital images is of critical importance in a time of enormous creation and sharing of these contents. This paper presents an improved digital image watermarking model based on a coefficient quantization technique that intelligently encodes the owner's information for each color channel to improve imperceptibility and robustness of the hidden information. Concretely, a novel color channel selection mechanism automatically selects the optimal HL4 and LH4 wavelet coefficient blocks for embedding binary bits by adjusting block differences, calculated between LH and HL coefficients of the host image. The channel selection aims to minimize the visual difference between the original image and the embedded image. On the other hand, the strength of the watermark is controlled by a factor to achieve an acceptable tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility. The arrangement of the watermark pixels before shuffling and the channel into which each pixel is embedded is ciphered in an associated key. This key is utterly required to recover the original watermark, which is extracted through an adaptive clustering thresholding mechanism based on the Otsu's algorithm. Benchmark results prove the model to support imperceptible watermarking as well as high robustness against common attacks in image processing, including geometric, non-geometric transformations, and lossy JPEG compression. The proposed method enhances more than 4źdB in the watermarked image quality and significantly reduces Bit Error Rate in the comparison of state-of-the-art approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.eswa.2016.06.015
Expert Syst. Appl.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Digital image watermarking,Discrete wavelet transform,Coefficients quantization,Optimal color-channel selection,Adaptive Otsu thresholding
Computer vision,Digital watermarking,Lossy compression,Computer science,Binary image,Image quality,Image processing,Digital image,Watermark,Artificial intelligence,Channel (digital image)
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
62
C
0957-4174
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.59
29
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Thien Huynh-The1294.08
Oresti Baños238035.57
Sungyoung Lee3132.00
Yongik Yoon 00014162.40
Thuong Le-Tien54610.64