A chaos-based robust wavelet-domain watermarking algorithm

In this paper, a chaos-based watermarking algorithm is developed in the wavelet domain for still images. The wavelet transform is commonly applied for watermarking, where the whole image is transformed in the frequency domain. In contrast to this conventional approach, we apply the wavelet transform only locally. We transform the subimage, which is extracted from the original image, in the frequency domain by using DWT and then embed the chaotic watermark into part of the subband coefficients. As usual, the watermark is detected by computing the correlation between the watermarked coefficients and the watermarking signal, where the watermarking threshold is chosen according to the Neyman-Pearson criterion based on some statistical assumptions. Watermark detection is accomplished without using the original image. Simulation results show that we can gain high fidelity and high robustness, especially under the typical attack of geometric operations. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.