Human Visual System Sentient Imperceptible and Efficient Wavelet-Based Watermarking Scheme for Copyright Protection of Digital Images

Contemporary information age facilitates easy duplication, manipulation and distribution of digital content. This has resulted in the necessity for safe guarding the rightful ownership of digital images. Copyright protection and content authentication of digital images have turned out to be a pressing problem to content owners and distributors. Digital watermarking offered an effective solution to this issue. The watermarking scheme needs to be robust and imperceptible in order to provide efficient copyright protection. The incorporation of Human Visual System (HVS) models into watermarking scheme can greatly aid in achieving the same. Lately, wavelet domain based watermarking schemes have attracted attention in watermarking researches. This paper discusses an imperceptible and efficient waveletbased watermarking scheme for copyright protection of images. The proposed watermarking scheme incorporates HVS models into watermark embedding and watermarking is performed in wavelet domain by means of Haar wavelet transform with lifting scheme. The image components are chosen for embedding on basis of entropy masking. A random matrix is generated based on a key image and is employed in both embedding and extraction processes. The correlation coefficient computation is utilized in the extraction of watermark. The experimental results have demonstrated the robustness and imperceptibility of the proposed scheme.