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A secure DWT-based dual watermarking scheme for image authentication and copyright protection

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Abstract

Digital watermarking mechanisms have become an essential tool for guaranteeing copyright protection and content authentication. However, most state-of-the-art works focus on providing only one of these services. In this paper, a dual watermarking scheme for image authentication and copyright protection is introduced. The proposed scheme simultaneously embeds two watermarks in the host image by exploiting the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). A fragile watermark and a robust watermark are embedded into frequency domain by modifying DWT coefficients of high-frequency sub-bands. To improve the scheme security, host image undergoes a chaotic transformation while robust watermark is obtained by using a particular visual cryptography technique. The proposed scheme provides satisfactory watermark imperceptibility levels, achieving PSNR values above 49dB when a small watermark is used and above 40dB when a larger watermark is embedded. Several image processing attacks are applied to evaluate the watermark robustness, obtaining normal correlation coefficient values near to 1 against most attacks. Finally, an authentication accuracy near to 1 is achieved when marked images undergo tampering attacks. The obtained results show that proposed scheme achieves competitive results in terms of imperceptibility and outperforms similar state-of-the-art dual watermarking methods in terms of watermark robustness and authentication accuracy.

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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article (and its supplementary information files).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico - CONACyT [grant numbers 702608 and 731618].

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  1. National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, Luis Enrique Erro 1, Santa Maria Tonantzintla, 72840, Puebla, Mexico

    A. Hernández-Joaquín, G. Melendez-Melendez & R. Cumplido

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  1. A. Hernández-Joaquín
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Hernández-Joaquín, A., Melendez-Melendez, G. & Cumplido, R. A secure DWT-based dual watermarking scheme for image authentication and copyright protection. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 42739–42761 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14974-1

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