An Effectively Utilized Histogram Modification Based Watermarking Scheme

In this paper, we propose a Copyright Protection (CP) watermarking scheme, which is a robust, blind, and reversible watermarking scheme; aimed at protecting the copyright of color images against geometrical attacks. It is a development of an already existing watermarking scheme. Watermark embedding in this scheme, as well as in its counterpart, mainly depends on the permutation of the histogram bins. However, we present a new embedding rule, which increased the average capacity by about 55 bits, and it increased the quality, PSNR, of the watermarked image from 35.01 dB to 38.05 dB. The embedded watermark demonstrates 100 % robustness against a variety of geometrical attacks, like Flipping (H, V, and Both), Rotation (90°, 180°, and 270°), Scattering, Warping, Skewing, and their combinations. Finally, our proposed CP watermarking scheme showed a faster watermark embedding process than that of its counterpart by an average reduction in time equals, 4.84 seconds.