Robust and Secure Watermarking Algorithm Based on High Frequencies of Integer Wavelet Transform

Nowadays, copyright owners, movie studios, photographers, software developers, and other content owners are concerned about copyright protection because of the ease of dissemination with internet technology. Watermarking and cryptography are two critical techniques for copyright protection, authentication, and broadcasting. Encryption protects multimedia content during transmission; however, after decryption, there is no protection. Frequency-based watermarking is an essential method to hide a logo, stamp, image, or text from the protected element. Discrete wavelet transformation and discrete cosine transformation give secure and robust results. However, these methods are not robust for some of the geometric attacks. In this work, we applied the integer wavelet transformation to hide binary watermark into the medical cover images. Cover images are first divided into blocks (
$4\times 4$
), and then a binary logo is embedded using a secret key. Peak signal-to-noise ratio and similarity ratio values show that the integer wavelet transform based proposed algorithm is more robust, secure, and resistant to attacks than other frequency-based algorithms.