Image Watermarking Using All Phase Discrete Cosine Biorthogonal Transform in Selected Pixel Blocks

Abstract

In the past decade, a transform called all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) appeared in the field of digital image processing. It is mainly used to solve the negativity found in discrete cosine transform (DCT), especially in a low bit rate. In this paper, the APDCBT is employed for watermark insertion based on selected regions of an image. The insertion is depending on the homogeneity of each part of the image. To determine the extent of homogeneity, there are two criteria: Mean and standard deviation are applied for the intensity of the image. Medium frequency bands of APDCBT in image pixel blocks are used to hold the embedded watermark. Then, the transform is inversed to obtain the resultant watermarked image. The robustness of APDCBT against watermark removal attacks is tested and the experimental results showed the superiority of the APDCBT over traditional DCT in the watermark embedding system. More specifically, when the LSB reset attack applied. For instance, when the contrast adjustment attack applied, the average of normalized crosscorrelation (NCC) values of extracted watermark images with the original watermark, it was 0.992 for the proposed method. This is a promised result, if it is compared with the NCC of the DCT method, which was 0.423. The proposed method can be used for copyright protection purpose.

Keywords

• all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform;
• discrete cosine transform;
• image watermark;
• information hiding;
• selected pixel blocks