Image Watermarking for Ensuring Image Integrity and Robust Copyright Protection Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform

Abstract

Digital media faces growing challenges related to unauthorized access, manipulation, and copyright infringement, necessitating robust solutions for authentication and copyright protection. This research introduces a novel dual watermarking scheme based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to address these issues. The primary goal is to offer robust copyright protection by embedding a watermark containing ownership and copyright information in the spatial domain using DWT, serving as a digital signature for identifying and tracing rightful ownership. Additionally, the frequency domain embedding improves the watermark's resilience to common attacks. The scheme also incorporates a fragile watermark for content authentication, embedded in the least significant bit to detect tampering. By comparing the fragile watermark, the content's integrity and authenticity are verified. Experimental results confirm the scheme's effectiveness, showing high imperceptibility and robust performance in protecting against unauthorized alterations while preserving visual quality. The proposed scheme achieved robustness performance with NC value of 0.98 under JPEG compression, the scheme also has ability to ensure the tamper detection with accuracy of 0.996 under tampering rate of 0.84.