A blind recovery technique with integer wavelet transforms in image watermarking

Abstract

The development of internet technology has simplified the sharing and modification of digital image information. The aim of this study is to propose a new blind recovery technique based on integer wavelets transform (BRIWT) by utilizing their image content. The LSB adjustment technique on the integer wavelet transform is used to embed recovery data into the two least significant bits (LSB) of the image content. Authentication bits are embedded into the current locations of the LSB of the image content, while the recovery information is embedded into different block locations based on the proposed block mapping. The embedded recovery data is securely placed at random locations within the two LSBs using a secret key. A three-layer embedding of authentication bits is used to validate the integrity of the image contents, achieving high precision and accuracy. Tamper localization accuracy is employed to identify recovery bits from the image content. This research also investigates the image inpainting method to enhance recovery from tampered images. The proposed image inpainting is performed by identifying non-tampered pixels in the surrounding tamper localization. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can produce highly watermarked images with imperceptibility, with an average SSIM value of 0.9978 and a PSNR value of 46.20 dB. The proposed scheme significantly improves the accuracy of tamper localization, with a precision of 0.9943 and an accuracy of 0.9971. The proposed recovery technique using integer wavelet transforms achieves high-quality blind recovery with an SSIM value of 0.9934 under a tampering rate of 10%. The findings of this study reveal that the proposed scheme improves the quality of blind recovery by 14.2 % under a tampering rate of 80 %.

Keywords

• Image watermarking
• Fragile watermarking
• Authentication
• Blind recovery
• Inpainting technique