Hybrid and blind watermarking scheme in DCuT - RDWT domain

In this paper, a hybrid and blind watermarking scheme is proposed for the protection of copyright of digital images. The scheme based on hybridization of two advance transforms such that discrete curvelet transform (DCuT) and redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT). The motivation behind using these two transforms combination to improve the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme. The imperceptibility requirement of the scheme is achieved using hybrid coefficients which are achieved by applying single level RDWT to the high frequency curvelet coefficients of the cover image. The watermark information is inserted by modifying the coefficients of the wavelet coefficients of LH subband using PN sequences according to watermark bit and gain factor. The security of the proposed scheme is achieved by applying Arnold scrambling to watermark image before embedding. Experiments of the proposed scheme are conducted on various types of natural images. Experiments results show that, compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme is robust to various attacks while having high imperceptibility. Also, the proposed scheme is performed better than many existing schemes. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.