Spatial Domain-Based Robust Watermarking Framework for Cultural Images

Abstract

Heritage multimedia, which include photographs, customs, knowledge, arts, rituals, audio, cultural information, and music, are valuable artifacts of any region. The most important attribute of heritage media is the transmission of important features of past generations, which reflect their way of living, innovative attitude, and diversity in archaeological and historical perspectives. However, the proliferation of the Internet has made such data exchange more challenging than ever, allowing unauthorized users to easily access such information. Under such circumstances, securing cultural heritage (CH) media is essential. In that regard, herein, we present a spatial domain-based blind and robust watermarking scheme for the ownership verification of colored CH images; this scheme uses DC coefficient modification. In this scheme, the "Y" element of the YCbCr space is used for inserting a watermark. The "Y" element of a host image is divided into non-overlapping blocks with sizes of 8 × 8. Each 8 × 8 block is then divided into two 4 × 8 subblocks. Instead of calculating the DC coefficients using the discrete cosine transform, we independently calculate the DC coefficient of every 4 × 8 subblock in the spatial domain. We test our method based on standard test images obtained from the USC-SIPI dataset and a self-created dataset of cultural images. Our scheme demonstrates improved robustness and lower computational complexity than frequency-domainbased techniques. The average peak signal-to-noise ratio of the proposed technique for test images is 40.0830 dB, and the structural similarity index matrix value is closer to one under no attack, ensuring the imperceptibility of the technique. Further, we prove the resilience of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with various state-of-the-art techniques.

Adaptive bistable stochastic resonance based blind watermark extraction in discrete cosine transform domain

“…Generally, there are two approaches to realize the digital watermarking: spatial domain method and transform domain method [7]. In spatial domain method, based on the fact that the least significant bit (LSB) of pixel data has little effect on human visual system, it provides a way of embedding the watermark signal into the LSB of some pixels of the original host image [8]. However, the spatial domain method has the shortcomings of poor robustness.…”

Robust Image Watermarking in Spatial Domain Utilizing Features Equivalent to SVD Transform

“…These watermarking techniques are simple to implement and require less effort than other schemes, although they generally compromise the quality. Watermarking schemes that directly modify the image pixels to insert the water-markʹs information without any transformation are considered spatial domain watermarking schemes [16][17][18]. The most basic method of watermarking in this category is to introduce the watermark by modifying the least significant bits (LSBs) of the pixels in the cover image [19,20].…”

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