A Robust Image Watermarking using Two Level DCT and Wavelet Packets Denoising

In this paper we present a blind low frequency watermarking scheme on gray level images, which is based on DCT transform and spread spectrum communications technique. We compute the DCT of non overlapping M blocks of the host image, then using the DC coefficients of each block we construct, a low-resolution approximation image. We apply block based DCT on this approximation image, then a pseudo random noise sequence is added into its high frequencies. For detection, we extract the approximation image from the watermarked image, then the same pseudo random noise sequence is generated, and its correlation is computed with high frequencies of the watermarked approximation image. In our method, higher robustness is obtained because of embedding the watermark in low frequency. In addition, higher imperceptibility is gained by scattering the watermark's bit in different blocks. We evaluated the robustness of the proposed technique against many common attacks such as JPEG compression, additive Gaussian noise and median filter. Compared with related works, our method proved to be highly resistant in cases of compression and additive noise, while preserving high PSNR for the watermarked images.