Low Power Block-Based Watermarking Algorithm

In recent years, digital watermarking has become a popular technique for labeling digital images by hiding secret information which can protect the copyright. The goal of this paper is to develop a DCT-based watermarking algorithm for low power and high performance. Our energy-efficient technique focuses on reducing computation required on block-based permutation. Instead of using spacial coefficients proposed by Hsu and Wu's algorithm [1], we use DCT coefficients to pair blocks directly. The approach is implemented by C language and estimated power dissipation using Wattch toolset. The experimental results show that our approach not only reduces 99% energy consumption of pairing mechanism, but also increase the PSNR by 0.414 db for the best case. Moreover, the proposed approach is robust to a variety of signal distortions, such as JPEG, image cropping, sharpening, blurring, and intensity adjusting.