Copyright Protection of Images by reversible, invisible, and robust Digital Watermarking using 3rd and 4th Level Discrete Wavelet Transform

Abstract

With the rapid development in the digital world, the authentication and protection of the data i.e. audio, image, video, is one of the major problem in the present era. Digital watermarking is the technique to provide copyright protection of the data. In past and in recent years many algorithms or schemes have been introduced for copyright protection of images. Among which few are unable to recover the original image after embedding the watermark i.e. the image get distorted during extraction of watermark. And few schemes are reversible in nature. In this paper, we proposed a watermarking scheme in discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain, which is not only reversible in nature but also robust against various attacks in providing copyright protection of images. In the proposed scheme, watermark is embedded at third and fourth level DWT and extracted watermark is compared with original watermark. Watermarked image is attacked by various types of attacks to check the invisibility, robustness & effectiveness of the scheme. Watermark is extracted from the attacked watermarked image and then compared with original watermark based on normalized correlation to validate the proposed scheme of providing reversibility in digital watermarking. It is useful in various real time applications such as: copyright protection, broadcast monitoring, content archiving, digital fingerprinting, etc.