Hybrid blind robust image watermarking technique based on DFT-DCT and Arnold transform

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid blind image watermarking technique combining DFT, DCT, and Arnold transform to enhance robustness and imperceptibility for digital image copyright protection.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid method that combines DFT, DCT, and Arnold transform, improving robustness and security over existing watermarking techniques.

Findings

Method is robust against various attacks.

Maintains high imperceptibility.

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in experiments.

Abstract

In this paper, a robust blind image watermarking method is proposed for copyright protection of digital images. This hybrid method relies on combining two well-known transforms that are the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The motivation behind this combination is to enhance the imperceptibility and the robustness. The imperceptibility requirement is achieved by using magnitudes of DFT coefficients while the robustness improvement is ensured by applying DCT to the DFT coefficients magnitude. The watermark is embedded by modifying the coefficients of the middle band of the DCT using a secret key. The security of the proposed method is enhanced by applying Arnold transform (AT) to the watermark before embedding. Experiments were conducted on natural and textured images. Results show that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method is robust to a wide range of attacks while preserving high imperceptibility.