Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization Based Image Watermarking Scheme

A novel image watermarking scheme based on the statistics of the blocked DCT coefficients. The watermark is embedded into the middle frequency of those DCT coefficients by modulating the number of those positive and negative coefficients. In order to achieve better robustness and imperceptibility, multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MPSO) has been used in the watermark embedding and extracting procedure. The particle swarm optimization is applied to obtain optimum multiple scaling factors and the embedding strength. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has significant improvement in term of imperceptibility and robustness under various general attacks.