Firefly optimized robust, imperceptible, secure watermarking scheme

Abstract

A multi-objective optimized hybrid image watermarking technique is being proposed considering robustness, imperceptibility and security aspects using two different scaling factors. In this technique, original image is subjected to third level lifting wavelet transform (LWT) followed by singular value decomposition (SVD). Watermark is split into two parts to embed each of them into a different subband. In the suggested scheme, firefly algorithm is employed to get optimum solutions for two scaling factors to balance tradeoff amid invisibility and robustness. Security in digitized data is an important aspect of image processing. It is improved with a key, an input to Arnold transform for scrambling watermark, to watermark embedding and extraction procedures. All the performance parameters like peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) and bit error rate (BER) are used in formulating maximization objective function. Evaluation of the proposed algorithm indicates that it is characterized by fairly good robustness, invisibility and security.