A novel optimized watermark embedding scheme for digital images

Abstract

Many Scientists in Image Processing try to find an efficient way for digital multimedia protection. Although standards and criteria are still in developing, the watermarking which performs mark picture embedding and extraction with original image has been identified as major technology to achieve ownership and copyright protection. This paper is aim to find a more efficient way to embedding watermark into a gray-scale original image using a new algorithm – Artificial Bee Colony to optimize pixel by pixel embedding at different frequency levels (sub-band) with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) Technology in order to enhance the security, invisibility to human visual and robustness of image watermarking. The proposed scheme will take efforts in higher level of DWT decomposition which provide better robustness but low quality of watermarked image and perform better quality of watermarked image and visible watermark compare to random embedding. The proposed new embedding method has been tested against most types of image modifications and in different frequency domain and levels of DWT to provide both high quality watermarked images and superior robustness.