Wavelet-based gray-level digital image watermarking

The watermarking technique has been proposed as a method by hiding secret information into the image to protect the copyright of multimedia data. But most previous work focuses on the algorithms of embedding one dimensional watermarks or two dimensional binary digital watermarks. In this paper, a wavelet based method for embedding a gray level digital watermark into an image is proposed. By still image decomposition technique, a gray level digital watermark is decompounded into a series of bitplanes. By discrete wavelet transform ( DWT ), the host image is decomposed into multiresolution representations with hierarchical structure. The different bitplanes of the gray level watermark is embedded into the corresponding resolution of the decomposed host image. The experimental results show that the proposed techniques can successfully survive image processing operations and the lossy compression techniques such as Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG).