Intelligent second generation watermarking technique with ICA

Image watermarking has become a popular technique for authentication and copyright protection with the development of Internet and computer. However, current image watermarking approaches especially blind techniques are not strongly robust with respect to attacks or combinations of several attacks. In this paper a new intelligent second generation blind image watermarking technique is proposed, which adopts independent component analysis (ICA) for watermarking process. The characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) are incorporated into the watermark embedding, so that the watermark can be adaptive to the protected image. The edge of original image which extracted by Sobel operator is used as watermark in this paper. The watermark is rearranged by chaotic before watermark embedding in order to enhance the robustness of watermarking and the embedding process can be performed in any image domain, including spatial and transform domain. Watermark can be extracted correctly not merely be detected without any information about the original image and original watermark, and the accuracy of watermark extraction depends on the statistical independence between the original image, original watermark and the key. This proposed intelligent system can also extract multiple watermarks embedded in the test image one by one. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed intelligent second generation watermarking technique based on ICA is robust with respect to attacks produced by popular watermark test software - Stirmark, including rotation, scaling, translation, skew, cropping, filtering, image compression, and combined attacks.