DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING IN DUAL DOMAINS

A modified digital image watermarking scheme based on the combination of spatial and transform domains is proposed. The aim of this work is to achieve robustness for the vital part of the watermark image without scarifying the embedding capacity of the watermark image. The watermark image is split into two parts depending on the vital information. The perceptibility of the watermarked image is improved by hiding the vital part of the watermark image in the blocks of the host image having highest variance in transform domain. The remaining part of the watermark image is watermarked in the spatial domain. The proposed algorithm is more secure for data hiding and robust for various attacks, viz., cropping and noise. The performance of this algorithm is noteworthy in terms of normalized cross correlation (NCC) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Additional security is achieved by permuting the watermark image. In this work Hadamard transform is used to hide the vital part of the watermark image in the host image.