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Dual image watermarking using a multi-level thresholding and selective zone-quantization for copyright protection, authentication and recovery applications

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Abstract

Image watermarking has been developed, recently, to meet the various concerns in multimedia copyright protection and forgery detection due to the explosive growth in multimedia sharing applications. In this work, a novel dual color image watermarking is developed for copyright protection, authentication and recovery applications. The proposed scheme is semifragile with three main pillars: a) the utilization of the WPT features for mark embedding by creating the so-called nested WPT trees, b) the insertion of the optimizing stage, before embedding, to aid proper selection of the scheme parameters for both robust and fragile mark bits), and, c) the development of the multi-level thresholding and selective quantization procedure that aims at modifying the nominated WPT locations only when required. Here, the input color image is split into its three color RGB triplets that are applied sequentially to WPT, then, nested trees that link the color triplets are created. Two watermarks are embedded into the obtained nested trees in a dual-watermarking approach. Here, the image digests are prepared, in the YCbCr domain, and used for recovery purposes. An optimizing procedure is developed to determine the proper locations, within each tree, for embedding of the digests for recovery purposes. At the extraction stage, the extracted robust mark bits are linked to the extracted authentication mark bits to construct the final extracted robust watermark, while the authentication mark bits are stepped forward to be used for authentication and recovery applications by mining the hidden image digest bits. Experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme has a high imperceptibility performance and could survive severe unintentional attacks. In case of intentional attacks, the scheme has shown a high forgery detection accuracy and recovery performance.

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Data availability

This is to state that:

• the datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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  1. EE Department, Faculty of Engineering, Jordan University of Science & Technology, Irbid, Jordan

    Hazem Munawer Al-Otum

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Al-Otum, H.M. Dual image watermarking using a multi-level thresholding and selective zone-quantization for copyright protection, authentication and recovery applications. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 25787–25828 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-11920-5

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