ABSTRACT
Watermarking has become a crucial technique for protecting copyright and verifying the authenticity of images due to the rapid distribution of digital images and the ease and reliability of image content modification. In this research, we introduce a hybrid digital picture watermarking method that is both secure and resilient. This would use the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), the discrete cosine transforms (DCT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and cryptographic systems such as RSA and chaotic maps. Hence, this method tries to balance the tradeoff of robustness, security, and imperceptibility. We first encrypt the watermark using RSA, and then a chaotic logistic map (CLM) scrambles the already designed encrypted watermark to further enhance its robustness. By putting the watermark in the host image's separately calculated DWT-DCT coefficients, the proposed method works well even when compression, noise addition filtering, and geometric attacks are used. The test results demonstrate that the suggested method does better than other methods in Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Normalized Correlation (NC), and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Regardless of the nature of the attack, our proposed method consistently generates PSNR values above 55 dB and NC values above to 0.90, indicating correct watermark extraction and excellent image perception. We use cryptographic methods to secure the watermark from retrieval and modification by unauthenticated users. In addition, our approach is superior to the current watermarking methods in robustness and unobtrusiveness. In further works, we plan to improve the robustness of the approach against more complex geometric attacks and apply it for watermarking video and 3D content.
