Singh Priyanka, Devi Kilari Jyothsna, Thakkar Hiren Kumar, Santamaría José
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SRM University, Amaravati 522508, India.
Department of Computer Engineering, Marwadi University, Rajkot 360006, India.
Entropy (Basel). 2021 Dec 8;23(12):1650. doi: 10.3390/e23121650.
In the past decade, rapid development in digital communication has led to prevalent use of digital images. More importantly, confidentiality issues have also come up recently due to the increase in digital image transmission across the Internet. Therefore, it is necessary to provide high imperceptibility and security to digitally transmitted images. In this paper, a novel blind digital image watermarking scheme is introduced tackling secured transmission of digital images, which provides a higher quality regarding both imperceptibility and robustness parameters. A block based hybrid IWT- SVD transform is implemented for robust transmission of digital images. To ensure high watermark security, the watermark is encrypted using a Pseudo random key which is generated adaptively from cover and watermark images. An encrypted watermark is embedded in randomly selected low entropy blocks to increase the security as well as imperceptibility. Embedding positions within the block are identified adaptively using a Blum-Blum-Shub Pseudo random generator. To ensure higher visual quality, Initial Scaling Factor (ISF) is chosen adaptively from a cover image using image range characteristics. ISF can be optimized using Nature Inspired Optimization (NIO) techniques for higher imperceptibility and robustness. Specifically, the ISF parameter is optimized by using three well-known and novel NIO-based algorithms such as Genetic Algorithms (GA), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), and Firefly Optimization algorithm. Experiments were conducted for the proposed scheme in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, security, embedding rate, and computational time. Experimental results support higher effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, performance comparison has been done with some of the existing state-of-the-art schemes which substantiates the improved performance of the proposed scheme.
在过去十年中，数字通信的快速发展导致数字图像的广泛使用。更重要的是，由于通过互联网传输的数字图像数量增加，保密问题最近也出现了。因此，有必要为数字传输的图像提供高不可感知性和安全性。本文介绍了一种新颖的盲数字图像水印方案，用于解决数字图像的安全传输问题，该方案在不可感知性和鲁棒性参数方面都提供了更高的质量。为了实现数字图像的鲁棒传输，实施了基于块的混合IWT-SVD变换。为确保水印的高安全性，水印使用从载体图像和水印图像自适应生成的伪随机密钥进行加密。加密后的水印嵌入到随机选择的低熵块中，以提高安全性和不可感知性。使用Blum-Blum-Shub伪随机发生器自适应地确定块内的嵌入位置。为确保更高的视觉质量，使用图像范围特征从载体图像中自适应选择初始缩放因子（ISF）。可以使用自然启发式优化（NIO）技术对ISF进行优化，以提高不可感知性和鲁棒性。具体而言，通过使用三种著名的新型基于NIO的算法，如遗传算法（GA）、人工蜂群算法（ABC）和萤火虫优化算法，对ISF参数进行优化。针对所提出的方案，在不可感知性、鲁棒性、安全性、嵌入率和计算时间方面进行了实验。实验结果支持了所提出方案的更高有效性。此外，还与一些现有的先进方案进行了性能比较，证实了所提出方案的性能改进。
