Optimized Digital Image Watermarking for Uncorrelated Color Space

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is a process of imperceptibly embedding newlinewatermark in the form of signature, random sequence or some image newlineinto an image (host) which may be used to verify the genuineness of its newlineowner. Watermarking could be used for various real-time applications newlinelike, protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) of multimedia contents, newlineforensics and piracy deterrence, content filtering, document and newlineimage security, broadcast monitoring, etc. Robustness of digital image newlinewatermarking methods are of paramount importance in the perspective newlineof the protection of multimedia contents due to easily accessible newlinedata manipulation tools and the strengthening of high data rate transfer newlineover the internet. Therefore, there is a growing interest in developing newlinea method to protect multimedia contents. However, no single newlinewatermarking method can be used to all applications. Therefore, the newlineprimary objective of this work is to design and develop the robust digital newlinewatermarking methods for the protection of color images from its newlineunauthorise utilization. newlineThe proposed watermarking methods consist of five steps. First, host newlineand watermark images are pre-processed using uncorrelated color space. newlineSecond, the watermark is embedded into the host image using four different newlineembedding methods. Third, post-processing is done by embedding newlinethe coefficients into the watermarked image. Fourth, performance newlineof proposed watermarking methods is improved using various optimization newlinemethods namely; genetic algorithm (GA), artificial bee colony newline(ABC), and differential evolution (DE). Finally, the extracted watermark newlineis verified for the genuineness of its owner. The performance of newlinedeveloped methods are measured under various signal processing and newlinegeometric attacks. newlineGenerally, researchers used RGB, Y CbCr, YIQ, HSI, orHSV, etc. color newlinespace models for both watermarks and host images in their digital newlinewatermarking methods which are correlated in nature and impose the newlinerestriction to use any one color component at a time for embedding newlinethe watermark.