ABC optimized secured image watermarking scheme to find out the rightful ownership

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is one the powerful means to find out the unauthorized use of copyrighted images. It inserts secret information (watermark) into the host image that helps in finding the rightful ownership of image. SVD (singular value decomposition) based watermarking is known for providing high capacity, robustness an imperceptibility but most of the SVD based techniques suffers from false positive issue. The proposed work is carried out in order to provide a secured image watermarking with a decent capacity. DWT (discrete wavelet transform) is employed on the host image and then block wise singular components (maximum) are used for watermark's principal component insertion. The insertion of principal component makes the scheme free from false positive error. The insertion is done with the help of multiple scaling factors. The values of scaling factors are found out with the help of ABC (artificial bee colony) in order to obtain a good tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility. The proposed scheme is also compared with earlier proposed schemes and it shows a visible improvement in performance. (C) 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.