A Robust Information Hiding Scheme Using Third Decomposition Layer of Wavelet Against Universal Attacks

Watermarking is one of the most common data hiding techniques for multimedia elements. Broadcasting, copy control, copyright protection and authentication are the most frequently used application areas of the watermarking. Secret data can be embedded into the cover image with changing the values of the pixels in spatial domain watermarking. In addition to this method, cover image can be converted into one of the transformation such as Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), Discrete Cousin Transformation (DCT) and Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT). Later on watermark can be embedded high frequencies of transformation coefficients. In this work, cover image transformed one, two and three level DWT decompositions. Binary watermark is hided into the low and high frequencies in each decomposition. Experimental results show that watermarked image is robust, secure and resist against several geometric attacks especially JPEG compression, Gaussian noise and histogram equalization. Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Similarity Ratio (SR) values show very optimal results when we compare the other frequency and spatial domain algorithms.