An adaptive, secure and imperceptive image watermarking using swarm intelligence, Arnold transform, SVD and DWT

Digital image watermarking is one of the important method of copyright protection and rightful ownership of the digital image and video. In this paper, the existing algorithm based on DWT-SVD is improved and made adaptive with particle swarm optimization (PSO) which increases the robustness and imperceptibility. Existing as well as proposed algorithm based on PSO creates diagonal line in the extracted watermark image against some of the noise attacks. Further to remove diagonal line from the extracted watermark image an algorithm based on PSO and Arnold transform is proposed. Both proposed algorithms (PSO and AT-PSO) are implemented and tested with different types of cover images. The comparative analysis of these two proposed algorithms is carried out with the existing algorithm. The comparative analysis shows that under most of noise attacks both the proposed algorithms outperform over the existing algorithm in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Similarity Ratio (NSR). Moreover, the imperceptibility offered by Arnold transform based algorithm is better as compared to the other proposed algorithm. Robustness of both the proposed algorithms is close to each other.

Automated summary

Digital image watermarking is an important method for copyright protection. This paper proposes an algorithm based on PSO and Arnold transform which outperforms the existing algorithm in terms of PSNR and NSR. The imperceptibility offered by Arnold transform based algorithm is also better compared to the other proposed algorithm.