Image Watermarking in Curvelet Domain Using Edge Surface Blocks

Abstract

Digital image watermarking aims to protect the information in an image without significantly affecting visual quality. In this paper, a new image watermarking technique has been proposed that uses Gaussian filters and first-order partial differential matrix to extort the edge surface of a host image. This paper influence on the edge surface curvelet coefficients as human eyes are not equally sensitive to a smooth and an edged surface. To preserve the quality of the artwork and to increase the resistance against attacks, the author utilizes the edge surface area of an image, coarse levels of curvelet transform, and strength parameters. The selection of host coefficients are conforming to the human visual system (HVS) is the uniqueness of the research. The exploitation of the Gaussian filters and first-order partial differential coarse curvelet coefficients and the watermark strength parameter offers robustness against image processing attacks. The standard visual quality perception of HVS evaluation metrics are used to measure the superiority of the presented work.

Keywords

• curvelet transform
• digital image watermarking
• edge surface
• structure similarity index measure (SSIM)