A Robust Image Watermarking in the Joint Time-Frequency Domain

• Published in: EURASIP journal on advances in signal processing Vol. 2010; no. 1
• Main Authors: Öztürk, Mahmut, Akan, Aydın, Çekiç, Yalçın
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.01.2010; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Computer simulation; Copyrights; Engineering; Filtering; Internet; Mathematical models; Quantum Information Technology; Research Article; Signal processing; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Spintronics; Time-Frequency Analysis and Its Applications to Multimedia Signals; Watermarking; Digital Watermark; Watermark Image; JPEG Compression; Copyright Protection; Gabor Frame
• ISSN: 1687-6180; 1687-6172; 1687-6180
• DOI: 10.1155/2010/509757

With the rapid development of computers and internet applications, copyright protection of multimedia data has become an important problem. Watermarking techniques are proposed as a solution to copyright protection of digital media files. In this paper, a new, robust, and high-capacity watermarking method that is based on spatiofrequency (SF) representation is presented. We use the discrete evolutionary transform (DET) calculated by the Gabor expansion to represent an image in the joint SF domain. The watermark is embedded onto selected coefficients in the joint SF domain. Hence, by combining the advantages of spatial and spectral domain watermarking methods, a robust, invisible, secure, and high-capacity watermarking method is presented. A correlation-based detector is also proposed to detect and extract any possible watermarks on an image. The proposed watermarking method was tested on some commonly used test images under different signal processing attacks like additive noise, Wiener and Median filtering, JPEG compression, rotation, and cropping. Simulation results show that our method is robust against all of the attacks.