Secure and Robust Digital Image Watermarking Using Coefficient Differencing and Chaotic Encryption

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 6; pp. 19876 - 19897
• Main Authors: Loan, Nazir A., Hurrah, Nasir N., Parah, Shabir A., Lee, Jong Weon, Sheikh, Javaid A., Bhat, G. Mohiuddin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.01.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Arnold transform; blind watermarking; chaos; Color imagery; DCT; Digital imaging; Digital watermarking; Discrete cosine transform; Discrete cosine transforms; Electronic health records; Electronic healthcare; Embedding; Encryption; Image compression; Image processing; Medical imaging; Payloads; Robustness; Security; Sharpening; Telemedicine; Watermarking
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2808172

This paper presents a chaotic encryption-based blind digital image watermarking technique applicable to both grayscale and color images. Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is used before embedding the watermark in the host image. The host image is divided into <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">8\times 8 </tex-math></inline-formula> nonoverlapping blocks prior to DCT application, and the watermark bit is embedded by modifying difference between DCT coefficients of adjacent blocks. Arnold transform is used in addition to chaotic encryption to add double-layer security to the watermark. Three different variants of the proposed algorithm have been tested and analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust to most of the image processing operations like joint picture expert group compression, sharpening, cropping, and median filtering. To validate the efficiency of the proposed technique, the simulation results are compared with certain state-of-art techniques. The comparison results illustrate that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of robustness, security, and imperceptivity. Given the merits of the proposed scheme, it can be used in applications like e-healthcare and telemedicine to robustly hide electronic health records in medical images.