A Novel Color Image Watermarking Method Based On Genetic Algorithm

The fast development of Internet makes it convenient to access the multimedia data. But at the same time the Internet has brought a new challenge to the copyright protection. As an effective means for the protection of digital property rights, the technique of digital watermarking is an important part of the region of information hiding and attracts wide attention. Digital watermarking is a technique that embeds copyright information, such as figures, sequence numbers, words, image logos and so on, imperceptibly into multimedia data. It can be used for tracing the distribution and usage of multimedia data. The special application of digital watermarking technique requires that the embedded watermark should be not only transparent to human observers, but also robust enough so that it cannot be easily destroyed or removed after some digital image processings or attacks.The basic concept and theory of digital watermarking is first described in this paper. According to the different ways of information hiding, the existing algorithms of digital image watermarking are concluded and compared. Based on the shortcoming of the existing algorithms, we propose a novel color image watermarking based on genetic algorithm. In the embedding scheme, the host image is first divided into un-overlapped sub-blocks in spatial domain and every block's activity is analyzed. We can embed watermarks into the frequency domain of these suitable active sub-blocks. By the proposed method based on genetic algorithm, the performance of every channel of color image is analyzed, and every channel has its own adaptive embedding intensity. We can ensure the controllability of watermark embedding strength and the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme. The usage of genetic algorithm makes our scheme not only improve image quality, but also furthest enhance security and robustness of the water-marked image. We simulate the algorithm in the computer and test the performance of watermark embedding, watermark extraction and the detection, extraction and recovery of the embedded watermark after different kinds of attacks. Experimental results show that the algorithm is feasible and robust.The research result of the proposed algorithm in this paper not only takes a further step to the technique of color image watermarking, but also remarkably enhances the ability of resisting against attacks of the watermark. And what's more, the watermark recovery based on the neural network fulfills the precise tracing of the multimedia data's usage and distribution.We propose a prospect of the technique of color image watermarking at the end of this paper. The extensive application in the future of the watermarking technique also attracts more watermarking algorithms.