A NEW SCHEME FOR DUAL WATERMARKING USING
DWT-PCA TECHNIQUE
Marzieh Amini
1
, Hamidreza Sadreazami
2
and Khashayar Yaghmaie
1
1
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Semnan, Semnan, Iran
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Keywords: Dual Watermarking, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Principal Component Analysis.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new scheme of dual watermarking by applying discrete wavelet transform and
principal component analysis. For the embedding, we identify two best sub bands of wavelet transform by
considering the intensity variance of each sub band. Two watermarks are embedded within the selected sub
bands with respect to their principal components. Using dual watermark improves robustness and
imperceptibility of algorithm and also takes advantage of using efficient bandwidth by embedding two
watermarks into host image. Interleaving technique is used to improve imperceptibility of the algorithm.
Experimental results show no visible difference between host and watermarked images. The proposed
watermarking method is also robust to various attacks such as JPEG compression, cropping, histogram
modification and gamma correction. This robustness is more noticeable when cropping or gamma correction
applies to the watermark image.
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, digital watermarking technology has
attracted great research interests. Watermarking is a
way of embedding a key into the original data in
order to increase security and copyright protection.
Several spatial domain and transform domain digital
watermarking algorithms have been proposed
(Mehul, 2003), (Dugad, 1998) Watermarking
schemes of transform domain have more advantages
than those in spatial domain. Discrete wavelet
transform (DWT) has some unique characteristics in
order to compatibility with human visual system
(HVS). Several works have been proposed to
combine DWT with other techniques in order to
increase robustness and imperceptibility
(Loukhaoukha, 2009), (Reddy ,2005). Principal
component analysis (PCA) is one of transformations
which have been used in watermarking (Hien, 2008),
(Kang, 2008), (Mostafa, 2009). The main
characteristic of this transform is its high energy
concentration and complete decorrelation. To
improve the robustness and protection, dual
watermarking has been employed (Bhatnagar, 2008).
In dual watermarking the primary and secondary
watermarks are embedded into host image in a way
that the primary watermark is a copyright symbol
and the secondary watermark is a fusion image. Also
we can take advantage of using efficient bandwidth
by embedding two watermarks into host image.
In this paper, after employing DWT on the host
image, we select two significant sub bands for
embedding two watermarks not only by using HVS
characteristics but also based on intensity variance
of each sub bands (Mansouri, 2009). In this way we
consider both robustness against attack and the best
quality of watermarked image. Then PCA is applied
to both sub bands in order to concentrate the energy
of coefficients and distributes the watermark energy
over embedding sub bands. As a result, we achieve
better robustness, perceptual transparency, and good
localization. The rest of the paper is organized as
follows: Section 2 provides a quick review on PCA.
In Section 3, proposed embedding and extracting
algorithms are explained. Experimental results are
presented in section 4. Finally, section 5 concludes
the paper.
43