Bit plane slicing based digital watermarking technique in DWT domain

Abstract

Authenticity of image and its copyright protection are one of the essential application of watermarking. In this paper, a hybrid technique for watermarking in DWT domain is presented for its application in the field of providing authentication to images. In this work binary image is used as watermark and is embedded in the 'host image'. Before embedding the watermark in the host, the host image is splitted into 8 bit planes using bit plane slicing. Followed that DWT is applied to the least significant bit plane which partitions the respective plane into low frequency (LL subband) and high frequency (HH, HL and LH subbands). The SVD is applied to HH subband of least significant bit plane and watermark is embedded on the singular matrix part of SVD. To analyse the robustness of the scheme proposed in this paper, watermarked image is attacked by different image processing attacks. Original watermark and extracted watermark is compared on the scale of normalized correlation to measure the robustness of the scheme against various attacks.