A simple bit plane based robust watermarking scheme

Proliferation of applications, complexity of business processes, and requirements of stronger security systems have put increasingly higher demands on Information Hiding. The increasing levels of Internet penetration has not only made communication easier, but has also increased the need for digital securities for individuals as well as enterprises. Hence, there is a need for simple and powerful techniques for improving security and watermarking that can be used by the simple user. This paper using two methods, namely splitting and randomization, proposes an efficient and novel method for information hiding and invisible watermarking of images. By splitting the image, a large number of smaller images are obtained which can be recombined in various combinations to simulate scrambling. In this paper, scrambling is achieved by randomizing the smaller images, using some random number generation algorithm, and then merged. These ideas are discussed and the case is made, through a number of examples that this simple watermarking procedure is both robust and powerful.