A secure and robust color image watermarking using nature-inspired intelligence

The security of multimedia information is a prime concern in the present digital world. As a remedy, a robust color image watermarking in the transform domain using artificial intelligence is reported in this article. A color host image is secured by embedding a color watermark by utilizing the singular value decomposition and discrete wavelet transform. The color watermark information is scrambled with a chaotic map to give an additional stage of protection to overcome the problem of illegal copying and alteration of digital data by unauthorized users. All three RGB color channels of host singular values are modified with principal components of respective RGB information of scrambled watermark image. Ownership of data is provided by extracting the watermark in the presence of a secret key used while embedding process. To overcome the trade-off between the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed algorithm artificial bee colony is used to optimize the scaling factor. The implementation of the proposed algorithm is performed on the MATLAB tool to compute the performance against the intentional and non-intentional image processing attacks. Comparative analysis with other related watermarking algorithms proves the robust, secure, and invisible nature of the proposed watermarking scheme.