Application of Toeplitz matrix in watermarking for image authentication

Digital watermarking is an effective and popular technique for discouraging illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted digital image information, which in turn provides an alternative solution for image authentication. This paper proposes an innovative watermarking scheme in which some pixels are randomly selected from original image, so that all of them have a valid 3×3 neighborhoods. A binary sequence is constructed from those pixels by comparing them against average values of their neighborhoods. The binary sequence is then converted into a watermark pattern in the form of a Toeplitz matrix to improve security of watermarking process and is then embedded within the host image. The operation of embedding and extraction of watermark is done in high frequency domain of Discrete Wavelet Transform. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated against some of the incidental image processing attacks. Finally computer simulations of the proposed method are compared with the recent algorithm that had been proposed in [8].