A set of embedding rules in IWT for watermark embedding in image watermarking

Abstract

The development of new technologies has made image watermarking crucial in the digital era to preserve and protect illegal distribution of images against unauthorized users. This paper presents a robust image watermarking technique that employs a set of embedding rules in the three-level of integer wavelet transform (IWT). The proposed method aims to achieve high robustness of image watermarking while maintaining the imperceptibility. The proposed scheme divides the red and green layers into non-overlapping 16×16 blocks. Three levels of IWT are applied to obtain 2×2 LL sub-band, four coefficients of IWT are then modified based on the proposed set of rules for embedding watermark. The experimental results demonstrate a comparison of the proposed embedding and the existing methods. The proposed scheme produced an average NC value of 0.965 against the median filter. The results also showed the imperceptibility of the the image with a PSNR of 45.1760 db and SSIM of 0.9995.