Comparative Study of Chaos-Based Robust Digital Image Watermarking Techniques

This paper contrasts the implementation of several chaos-based digital image watermarking techniques in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, security and complexity. Most spatial and transform domains methods have been used namely Least Significant Bit (LSB), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) mathematical tool which has enhanced embedding capability. Both continuous and discrete chaotic maps namely Arnold's Chaotic Map (ACM), Logistic Chaotic map (LCM) and Lorenz Chaotic Map (LoCM) are included to result in secure schemes. Exhaustive series of tests have been performed along with a range of evaluation metrics for imperceptibility evaluation. In addition, Robustness of all the techniques has also been confirmed by applying a variety of attacks on the resulting images. This study will help to adopt the most suitable methods for a given application as sufficient number of test images have been utilized.