Adaptive, robust and blind digital watermarking using Bhattacharyya distance and bit manipulation

Ownership identification and copyright protection are two major concerns for digital data. Digital watermarking provides the best solution for these issues. In order to preserve the copyright protection and identify the ownership of digital data, a robust blind watermarking method using Bhattacharyya distance and exponential function is proposed. The proposed method is adaptive since the embedding factor is calculated based on the gray scale pixel distribution of the host image. Insertion of watermark is done in two phases in which the first phase is carried out in wavelet domain, and the second phase in spatial domain. Similarly extraction of watermark is done in two phases. The proposed method is tested using standard benchmark color images and a binary watermark. The proposed method is analyzed with various image and signal processing attacks and compared with other methods. The results show that the proposed method has better performance than other methods.