Adaptive image watermarking using human perception based fuzzy inference system

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Jamali, Maedeh^a | Rafiei, Shima^a | Soroushmehr, S.M. Reza ^{b; *} | Karimi, Nader^a | Shirani, Shahram^c | Najarian, Kayvan^b | Samavi, Shadrokh^{a; b; c}

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. S.M. Reza Soroushmehr, Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109, USA. E-mail: ssoroush@umich.edu.

Abstract: Development of digital content has increased the necessity of copyright protection using watermarking. Imperceptibility and robustness are two important features of watermarking algorithms. The goal of watermarking methods is to satisfy the tradeoff between these two contradicting characteristics. Recently, watermarking methods in transform domains have displayed favorable results. In this paper, we present an adaptive blind watermarking method, which has high imperceptibility in areas that are important to the human visual system. We propose a fuzzy system to control the embedding strength factor adaptively. Image saliency, intensity, and edge-concentration are shown to be important to a human observer and are hence used as fuzzy attributes. Embedding is performed in the discrete cosine transform of the wavelet domain to achieve high imperceptibility and acceptable robustness. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm over comparable methods.

Keywords: Blind watermarking, fuzzy system, saliency, discrete wavelet transform, adaptive strength factor

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-171805

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 4589-4608, 2018