AN IMPROVED WAVELET DOMAIN DIGITAL WATERMARKING FOR IMAGE PROTECTION

Abstract

Watermarking is a potential method for the protection of ownership rights on digital images. A robust, invisible, non-blind watermarking scheme in the wavelet domain is proposed in this paper. The watermark is embedded in the mid frequency band after performing a single level wavelet decomposition using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The coefficients are grouped randomly prior to watermarking. The watermarked image is tested for various attacks including filtering and geometric attacks. The novelty of the proposed approach is that it provides better resistance to collusion attack also when compared with existing spatial domain approach. The appropriate mid frequency band for embedding the watermark is tested and the HL band proves to be the best.