Blind invisible watermarking technique in DT-CWT domain using visual cryptography

Abstract

A method for digital image copyright protection is presented in this paper. The proposed method is a blind invisible and robust image watermarking scheme based on Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) and Visual Cryptography concept (VC). This method does not require that the watermark to be embedded into the original image which leaves the marked image equal to the original one. In the concealing and extracting process, the image is transformed in the complex wavelet domain to generate a secret and a public share respectively, using LL sub-band features and a VC codebook. To extract the watermark from the attacked image, the secret and public shares are stacked together. To improve the visual quality of the extracted watermark, a post process called reduction procedure is also proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed method can withstand several image processing attacks such as cropping, filtering and compression etc... © 2013 Springer-Verlag.