Optimized Image Watermarking Scheme Based On PSO

The digital watermarking scheme provides copyright protection to multimedia contents especially to digital images. In this paper a secure optimized watermarking scheme for copyright protection of images using Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) in daubechies4 transform is proposed.. The image quality index metrics (IQIM) is used to measure the image quality distortion which is modeled with respect to factors such as loss of correlation, luminance distortion, and contrast distortion. The coefficients are selected in Daubechies domain with help of particle swarm optimization to embed the DCT transformed selected high energy coefficients watermark bits in the host image. Different attacks are employed in PSO training to assess the robustness and imperceptibility of watermarked image. The experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education