A Dwt and Scrambling Based Blind Watermarking Algorithm for Digital Images Authentication

Abstract

Like the other multimedia that is spread on the Internet, images are also vulnerable to theft and attacks. Protecting the image is therefore an urgent necessity because it represents a large proportion of the digital content. Authentication and ownership protection are the basic demands of image security and these are achieved by applying watermarking techniques. For the Muslim world, the Holy Quran has its sanctity, which does not accept any controversy or doubt. As part of keeping pace with modern technology, digital copies of the Holy Qur’an are available, which are widely distributed all over the world. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that these copies maintain their integrity and ensure that there are no malicious manipulations. In this paper, we propose an image watermarking scheme to authenticate the images of digital version of Holy Quran using discrete wavelet transform DWT. Here a fragile watermark is used to clarify whether there is any modification occurred to the intended images. Initially the cover image is decomposed by DWT where 2nd and 4th level coefficients are exploited for watermark embedding. The intended watermark is obtained by scrambling the original cover image. Then the scrambled image is inserted into the DWT coefficients by several trials using different embedding gains. To evaluate our system and see how effective it is to detect any error or manipulation, PSNR, SSIM and MSE are employed beside that they are acting as an imperceptibility measure. Results proved that our method has achieved a good level of imperceptibility and can detect any slight tamper. It is necessary to bear in mind that this method is valid for application to normal color images as well and gives an excellent level of efficiency