A new facet in robust digital watermarking framework

Generally, in watermarking techniques the size of the watermark is very small when compared to the host image. On the contrary, this is an attempt in which a new facet in watermarking framework is presented where the size of host image is very small when compared to the watermark image. The core idea of the proposed technique is to first scale up the size of host image equal to the size of watermark using chaotic map and Hessenberg decomposition followed by the redundant wavelet transform. A meaningful gray scale watermark is embedded in the low frequency sub-band at the finest level using singular value decomposition. To prevent ambiguity and enhance the security, a binary watermark is also embedded in loss-less manner which ensures the authenticity of the watermarked image. Finally, a reliable watermark extraction scheme is developed for extracting both the watermarks. The experimental results demonstrate better visual imperceptibility and resiliency of the proposed scheme against intentional or un-intentional variety of attacks. (C) 2011 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.