Gene

Algorithm

Chaotic

CHAOS (operating system)

Digital watermarking

Computer security

Deterministic encryption

Robustness (evolution)

Theoretical computer science

Encryption

Image processing

Grayscale

Biochemistry

Computer science

Watermark

Embedding

Discrete cosine transform

Multiple encryption

Image (mathematics)

Watermarking attack

Sharpening

Artificial intelligence

Digital image

Cryptography

Chemistry

Computer vision

IEEE Access

This paper presents a chaotic encryption-based blind digital image watermarking technique applicable to both grayscale and color images. Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is used before embedding the watermark in the host image. The host image is divided into 8 × 8 nonoverlapping blocks prior to DCT application, and the watermark bit is embedded by modifying difference between DCT coefficients of adjacent blocks. Arnold transform is used in addition to chaotic encryption to add double-layer security to the watermark. Three different variants of the proposed algorithm have been tested and analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust to most of the image processing operations like joint picture expert group compression, sharpening, cropping, and median filtering. To validate the efficiency of the proposed technique, the simulation results are compared with certain state-of-art techniques. The comparison results illustrate that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of robustness, security, and imperceptivity. Given the merits of the proposed scheme, it can be used in applications like e-healthcare and telemedicine to robustly hide electronic health records in medical images.

Secure and Robust Digital Image Watermarking Using Coefficient Differencing and Chaotic Encryption