Blind image watermarking technique based on differential embedding in DWT and DCT domains

Abstract

This paper presents a new blind and robust image watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT). Two DCT-transformed sub-vectors are used to embed the bits of the watermark sequence in a differential manner. The original sub-vectors are obtained by the sub-sampling of the approximation coefficients of the DWT transform of the host image. During the extraction stage, the simple difference between the corresponding sub-vectors of the watermarked image, gives directly the embedded watermark sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique successfully fulfills the requirement of imperceptibility and provides high robustness against a number of image-processing attacks, such as JPEG compression, noise adding, low-pass filtering, sharpening, and bit-plane removal. Our scheme exhibits also an acceptable to good performance against some geometrical attacks such as resizing and cropping.