Adaptive Digital Watermarking of Images using Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for adaptive watermark strength optimization in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. Watermarking is a method to embed secret information in the host medium. Optimal strength selection for watermark is the most critical aspect in the whole process and it had attracted many researchers in the recent past. In the proposed method watermark strength is intelligently selected through Genetic Algorithm (GA). GA helps in perceptual shaping of the watermark such that it is less perceivable to the human visual system. Proposed method shows promising results against different attacks, such as lowpass filter, high-pass filter, median filters, shifting and cropping the marked image. Experimental results have shown better performance of the proposed method than the current approaches in practice