Employing intelligence in the embedding and decoding stages of a robust watermarking system

Abstract This letter presents a novel approach of incorporating intelligence in the encoding and decoding structures of a watermarking system. The employment of computational intelligence makes the watermarking system resistant against a series of attacks, which may occur during the storage or communication of the watermarked work. Keeping in view the Human Visual System, Genetic Programming is used to generate functions which select optimum strength and location of transform domain coefficients for watermark embedding. Support Vector Machines and Artificial Neural Networks are employed at the decoding side to learn about the distortions due to attacks and counteract them. Especially, the proposed system is quite effective for robust watermarking applications of small size images such as those displayed on portable devices and online catalogs.