Adaptive scaling factors based on the impact of selected DCT coefficients for image watermarking

Image watermarking technique aims at high imperceptibility of the embedded watermark with minimal distortion in the watermarked images. In frequency-domain, block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is a popular method which can be improved by different scaling factors. This paper presents an adaptive scaling factor for selected DCT coefficients in image watermarking. The image blocks that have lowest pixel variances are chosen as the embedding locations. The optimal scaling factors for selected DCT coefficients on the middle frequencies are obtained by finding the best quality of images. The embed-ding process is performed using the obtained scaling factors. The proposed technique was investigated to verify the robustness and imperceptibility against various image-processing attacks. It is proved that our technique achieves higher robustness against noise addition, filter and compression than the existing schemes in most cases. Our technique produces greater imperceptibility than the existing schemes.(c) 2020 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).