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Artificial bee colony optimized robust-reversible image watermarking

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Abstract

The ownership verification of digital images is possible by the help of image watermarking. Watermarking make the image secure towards unlawful use; but at the same time, it causes some information loss too. Medical and defense are few fields, where even a small change in data can be very problematic. So there is need of reliable and lossless watermarking schemes. The present study is focused on the development of lossless watermarking method that can fulfill five basic requirements (robustness, reversibility, invisibility, security and capacity) of ideal lossless watermarking scheme maximally. Arnold transformed watermark is embedded into the host to restrict any unauthorized access of watermark even after extraction. Slantlet transformed coefficients are known to be quite robust towards image processing attacks; so block wise Slantlet transform is employed to resist the maximum attacks and to ensure a decent capacity. Mean values of transformed coefficients are used for embedding to increase the robustness and imperceptibility. The spatial domain overflow/underflow (due to embedding) is taken care by a post processing to satisfy the reversibility requirements. The embedding strength of watermarking is controlled with the help of artificial bee colony (ABC) in order to get an optimal tradeoff between invisibility and robustness. The proposed scheme is applied to a range of images to show its applicability to different domains.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (NRF-2015R1D1A1A02062017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India

    Irshad Ahmad Ansari & Millie Pant

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, 2066 Seobu-ro, Jangan-gu, Suwon, 440-746, Republic of Korea

    Chang Wook Ahn

Authors
  1. Irshad Ahmad Ansari
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  2. Millie Pant
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  3. Chang Wook Ahn
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Correspondence to Chang Wook Ahn.

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Ansari, I.A., Pant, M. & Ahn, C.W. Artificial bee colony optimized robust-reversible image watermarking. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 18001–18025 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3680-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3680-z

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