A Novel Watermarking Method with Resistance to Image Manipulations via Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Domain

Abstract

A new digital image watermarking method based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform is proposed. The proposed method is shown to be robust to geometric and non-geometric modifications performed on the watermarked image. The complex wavelet domain for watermark insertion gives rise to robustness for non-geometric modifications, while the image normalization provides robustness against geometric modifications. First, the original image is normalized. Then, a watermark is generated such that the capacity is more than one bit according to the properties of the human visual system, and it is added to the three detail subbands coefficients of the normalized image at the first decomposition level in the complex wavelet domain. Finally, successive applications of the inverse complex wavelet transform and the inverse normalization give the watermarked image. Computer simulations show that the method is robust to numerous image manipulations and is superior to the existing digital image watermarking approaches. However, the implementation of the complex wavelet transform is computationally costly. Hence, dual tree implementation is used to reduce computational complexity in the experiments.

Keywords

• Digital image watermarking
• Image normalization
• DT-CWT

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