Effect of Weight Factor on The Performance of Hybrid Column Wavelet Transform used for Watermarking under Various Attacks.

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is aimed at copyright protection of digital images. Strength of embedded watermark plays an important role in robustness and invisibility of watermarking technique. In this paper, effect of two parameters namely, watermark strength and middle frequency coefficients of host image used for embedding watermark is studied. In the given watermarking technique, watermark is normalized before embedding. This reduces the strength of watermark so that there will be minimum possible distortion in watermarked image. However, it has been observed in our work proposed in previous paper that, such embedment responds poorly to various image processing attacks like compression, cropping, resizing, noise addition etc. Hence in this paper, an attempt has been made to increase the strength of embedded watermark by using suitable weight factor so that robustness of watermarking technique proposed in our previous paper is further increased with small acceptable decrease in imperceptibility. Also middle frequency elements of host image selected for embedding watermark are varied by selecting different rows of host such that slowly we move from middle frequency components towards high frequency components. For certain attacks like image cropping, selection of middle frequency coefficients affects the robustness achieved. Increase in weight factor significantly improves the performance of given watermarking technique by more than 50% as proposed in our previous paper where weight factor value was 25.