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Improved adaptive reversible watermarking in integer wavelet transform using moth-flame optimization

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Abstract

With increasing connectivity, unprotected digital content is vulnerable to attacks and thus watermarking them is essential for copyright protection. This paper presents an effective adaptive reversible image watermarking. The approach utilizes the selection of optimal location for embedding according to entropy, where appropriate threshold for entropy selection is taken care by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. A technique in integer wavelet transform (IWT) domain is proposed, further discrete cosine transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is hybridized for embedding process in all the chosen blocks, and the Fractal encrypted watermark bits are integrated into coefficients of image using the average proximity coefficient. The embedding process is governed by optimal scale, which is adaptively generated by moth-flame optimization (MFO) according to specially designed fitness function. The proposed technique when evaluated using several standard indicators exhibited improved reliability, robustness, and imperceptibility in comparison to the existing schemes.

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  1. Department of ECE, K.S. Institute of Technology, Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi, Karnataka, India

    H. R. Lakshmi

  2. Department of ECE, K. S. Institute of Technology, Bangalore, 560109, India

    Surekha Borra

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Lakshmi, H.R., Borra, S. Improved adaptive reversible watermarking in integer wavelet transform using moth-flame optimization. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 17183–17215 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16203-1

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