Fast and High Capacity Digital Image Watermarking Technique Based on Phase of Zernike Moments

Zernike Moments (ZMs) are used in many image processing applications, due to their resistance against various signal processing and geometric attacks. Digital image watermarking is one of those application areas, where ZMs are widely used to insert and extract the watermark bits for digital media authentication. In all the existing ZM based watermarking techniques, magnitude of moments is used to insert and extract the watermark. In this paper, the authors’ have proposed a semi blind watermarking technique in which phase of ZMs is used for watermark insertion and extraction. Due to the use of phase of ZMs, 100% detection ratio is achieved against any geometric and other signal processing attacks. To make the proposed technique fast, q-recursive method is used to compute the Zernike polynomials. The use of q-recursive method has also increased the transparency of watermark due to its better reconstruction ability as compared to traditional moment computation method. Through detailed experimentation, it has been confirmed that the proposed watermarking technique is fast, has more imperceptibility, less Bit Error Rate (BER) and more capacity as compared to traditional ZMs magnitude based watermarking technique. DOI: 10.4018/ijcvip.2012010104 International Journal of Computer Vision and Image Processing, 2(1), 60-74, January-March 2012 61 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. The visibility of watermark in the watermarked image can be controlled. Yongqing et al. (2011) have analyzed the invariance property of ZMs and proposed magnitude based watermarking technique. In this watermarking technique, magnitude of selected moments is quantized to insert the watermark bits. The authors have computed ZMs up to high order to support high payload to be embedded as watermark. The watermarking technique proposed by them is robust against rotation, scaling, flipping, additive noise and lossy compression. They have concluded that as the number of embedded watermark bits increases, the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) decreases and hence quality of watermarked image degrades. In the proposed watermarking technique, large number of bits can be inserted as watermark without degrading the quality of watermarked image. Kim et al. (2003) have also used magnitude of ZMs as invariant feature vector of the host image. This feature vector is modified to insert the watermark bits and using the modified feature vector watermarked image is reconstructed. At the detector end, the feature vector of transformed watermarked image and original feature vector is compared to authenticate the watermarked image. The drawback of this technique is that the computation of ZMs (up to moment order 5) take five minutes for 256 ×256 image. To reduce the computation time, we propose the use of q-recursive method for computing Zernike polynomials. Palak et al. (2004) have proposed a watermarking technique based on ZMs and odd even quantization. In this technique, the watermark bits are inserted by quantizing the magnitude of the ZMs using odd-even quantization method. Through experiments, the authors have concluded that this technique has detection ratio of 97% for rotation and of 75% for additive noise. In all of the existing digital image watermarking techniques (Bas et al., 2002; Xin et al., 2004, 2007; Jin et al., 2009; Jie et al., 2008; Nitin et al., 2007; Viet et al., 2007), magnitude of ZMs is used for watermark insertion and retrieval. Shan et al. (2009) have analyzed the importance of phase information of ZMs and used the combination of both magnitude and phase feature to design an Invariant Zernike Moment Descriptor (IZMD) for image retrieval. Due to sensitivity of phase information against image rotation, authors have performed phase correction at the time of feature extraction from the rotated image. After correcting the phase, feature descriptor is found to be more robust against Rotation, Scaling and Translation (RST) attacks and other signal processing attacks. In the proposed digital image watermarking technique, before the extraction of watermark bits, phase of the transformed watermarked image is corrected using the method proposed by Shan et al. (2009) and Singh et al. (2011). To correct the phase of transformed watermarked image, moments of original watermarked image and transformed watermarked image are required. Further, in order to reduce the time required to compute ZMs, q-recursive method proposed by Chong et al. (2003) is used in our proposed watermarking technique. Also using the q-recursive method, moments remain stable up to high order as compared to the traditional ZMs computation method as proved by Singh et al. (2011). Due to the stability of moments high order, more moments can be computed and selected for watermark insertion by using q-recursive moment computation method. Thus, with the help of q-recursive method, capacity of the proposed watermarking technique is increased and computation time is decreased as compared to the existing watermarking techniques. Also due to the extraction of moments from corrected moments, BER is reduced to zero in our proposed watermarking technique. The benchmark for a high-quality watermarking technique is to have high capacity, low BER, more invisibility of watermark and robustness against all geometric attacks and signal processing attacks. All these parameters are achieved in our proposed watermarking technique using combination of q-recursive moment computation technique and use of phase component of the ZMs for watermark insertion and extraction. The q-recursive method to compute Zernike polynomials is specified 13 more pages are available in the full version of this document, which may be purchased using the "Add to Cart" button on the product's webpage: www.igi-global.com/article/fast-high-capacity-digitalimage/68004?camid=4v1 This title is available in InfoSci-Journals, InfoSci-Journal Disciplines Computer Science, Security, and Information Technology. Recommend this product to your librarian: www.igi-global.com/e-resources/libraryrecommendation/?id=2