Robust Hybrid Image Watermarking based on Discrete Wavelet and Shearlet Transforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust hybrid image watermarking technique combining Discrete Wavelet and Shearlet transforms, embedding watermarks into singular values for improved resistance against attacks.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid scheme that leverages DWT and Shearlet transforms with BSVD for enhanced watermark robustness and transparency.

Findings

High robustness against image processing and geometric attacks

Good transparency of the watermarked images

Effective representation of image edges improves watermark resilience

Abstract

With the growth of digital networks such as the Internet, digital media have been explosively developed in e-commerce and online services. This causes problems such as illegal copy and fake ownership. Watermarking is proposed as one of the solutions to such cases. Among different watermarking techniques, the wavelet transform has been used more because of its good ability in modeling the human visual system. Recently, Shearlet transform as an extension of Wavelet transform which is based on multi-resolution and multi-directional analysis is introduced. The most important feature of this transform is the appropriate representation of image edges. In this paper a hybrid scheme using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Shearlet Transform (DST) is presented. In this way, the host image is decomposed using DWT, and then its low frequency sub-band is decomposed by DST. After that, the bidiagonal singular value decomposition (BSVD) is applied on the selected sub-band from Shearlet transform and the gray-scale watermark image is embedded into its bidiagonal singular values. The proposed method is examined on the images with different textures and resistance is evaluated against various attacks like image processing and geometric attacks. The results show good transparency and high robustness in proposed method.