A robust optimal zero-watermarking technique for secret watermark sharing

Abstract

In this paper, a robust optimal zero-watermarking technique based on genetic algorithm for secret watermark sharing is proposed for the purpose of copyright protection. It is implemented in discrete cosine transform (DCT) for gray scale images in which the visual secret sharing is used to generate unexpanded master and secret shares for the watermark. The GA based zero watermarking is used to select the perfect positions to extract the robust features. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme is highly robust even after different types of attacks being applied, where NC values of each selected attack are considered in the fitness function of the genetic optimization algorithm.