Robust Color Image Watermarking using Biometric Protection and Image Authentication Key

Abstract

In recent days, it becomes difficult to provide protection to color images which were captured by modern capturing devices. This paper presents a novel work on copyright protection by providing authentication process for extraction of watermark of color still images. New blind frequency domain non-correlation based watermarking algorithm using one dimensional Walsh coding technique is introduced to improve the robustness. The developed algorithms do not required the original image for extraction. The biometric protection system and image identification key was introduced as two watermarks for embedding where image authentication key is used as authorization to recover biometric fingerprint image. The equivalent binary value of watermarks are first encoded through Walsh code and then embedded in the low frequency coefficients of DCT of the host image. During the process of extraction, image authentication key is required to decode the biometric fingerprint image. Based on the quality measurement criteria (PSNR and SSIM), the scheme was tested to measure the fidelity of the watermarking image and tested against JPEG compression.  Result was also evaluated by using StirMark tools for different attacks.