A Robust Digital Image Watermarking Technique Based on DWT and Fastica

Abstract

With the increasing use of internet and effortless
copying, copyright protection for multimedia data has become an
important issue. Digital watermarking has emerged as a tool for
protecting the multimedia data from copyright infringement. Many
literatures have reported about frequency transform based
watermarking techniques for data security, since they are robust
against image processing attacks. In this paper, an attempt is made to
develop a watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) and extraction using fast independent component analysis
(FastICA) algorithm. A perceptual model is applied with stochastic
approach for watermark embedding. This is based on computation of
noise visibility function (NVF) which has local image properties
where the strength of watermarking is controlled. ICA, an intelligent
detection algorithm, which is based on blind source separation
technique, is implemented for extraction without the use of previous
knowledge of the original image. The features of FastICA are quick
convergence, easy to implement and suitable for watermark
applications. Robustness of the proposed scheme is validated by
implementing common image processing attacks. Peak signal to noise
ratio (PSNR) and similarity measure (SM) values are calculated to
evaluate the performance of the proposed work.