Discrete Fourier transform–based watermarking method with an optimal implementation radius

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the degradation of an image due to the implementation of a watermark in the frequency domain of the image. As a result, a watermarking method, which minimizes the impact of the watermark implementation on the overall quality of an image, is developed. The watermark is embedded in magnitudes of the Fourier transform. A peak signal-to-noise ratio is used to evaluate quality degradation. The obtained results were used to develop a watermarking strategy that chooses the optimal radius of the implementation to minimize quality degradation. The robustness of the proposed method was evaluated on the dataset of 1000 images. Detection rates and receiver operating characteristic performance showed considerable robustness against the print-scan process, print-cam process, amplitude modulated, halftoning, and attacks from the StirMark benchmark software.