A secure blind watermarking scheme based on DCT domain of the scrambled image

Abstract: This paper investigates a secure blind watermarking scheme. The main idea of the scheme not only protects the watermark information but also the embedding positions. To achieve a higher level of security, we propose a sub key generation mechanism based on the singular value decomposition and hash function, where sub keys depend on both the main key and the feature codes of the original image. The different sub keys ensure that the embedding positions are randomly selected for different original images. Watermark is embedded in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the scrambled original image. Simulation results show that such embedded method resolves well the contradiction of imperceptibility and robustness. Based on good correlation properties of chaotic sequences, we design a detection method, which can accurately compute geometric transformation (rotation and translation transformations) parameters. The security analysis, including key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis, cryptanalysis, and the comparison results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme also achieves high security.