A secure blind watermarking scheme based on DCT domain of the scrambled image

TL;DR

This paper presents a secure blind watermarking scheme in the DCT domain that enhances security through sub key generation based on SVD and hash functions, ensuring robustness and imperceptibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel sub key generation mechanism combining SVD and hash functions for secure, image-dependent watermark embedding in the DCT domain.

Findings

High robustness against geometric transformations

Strong security demonstrated through key space and sensitivity analysis

Effective balance of imperceptibility and robustness

Abstract

This paper investigates a secure blind watermarking scheme. The main idea of the scheme not only protects the watermark information but also the embedding positions. To achieve a higher level of security, we propose a sub key generation mechanism based on the singular value decomposition and hash function, where sub keys depend on both the main key and the feature codes of the original image. The different sub keys ensure that the embedding positions are randomly selected for different original images. Watermark is embedded in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the scrambled original image. Simulation results show that such embedded method resolves well the contradiction of imperceptibility and robustness. Based on good correlation properties of chaotic sequences, we design a detection method, which can accurately compute geometric transformation (rotation and translation transformations) parameters. The security analysis, including key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis, cryptanalysis, and the comparison results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme also achieves high security.