On the implementation of a secured watermarking mechanism based on cryptography and bit pairs matching

Watermarking is one of the most vital digital information hiding technique, which can be used with cryptography mechanism for providing more security to digital data. In image watermarking mechanism mostly LSB substitution is used on the cover image for hiding the secret watermark. In this paper, a novel technique based on the matching of bit pairs and symmetric key cryptography is proposed. Pixel bits of original image and encrypted watermark image are arranged in pairs. The pixel bits are represented in pairs following the proposed algorithm, then the encrypted watermark pixel bit pairs are compared with all bit pairs of original image and accordingly the replacement of bit pairs takes place with the respective matched pair assigned number binary equivalent. If no match is found then go for replacing the 0th pair with watermark bits and replace the two LSB with the value of pair number 0. The proposed mechanism shows good quality of watermarked image along with good PSNR values with a good payload. By comparing the results with some existing algorithms, the proposed scheme shows the valuable results. (c) 2018 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/).