Fast and High Capacity Digital Image Watermarking Technique Based on Phase of Zernike Moments

Zernike Moments (ZMs) are used in many image processing applications, due to their resistance against various signal processing and geometric attacks. Digital image watermarking is one of those application areas, where ZMs are widely used to insert and extract the watermark bits for digital media authentication. In all the existing ZM based watermarking techniques, magnitude of moments is used to insert and extract the watermark. In this paper, the authors’ have proposed a semi blind watermarking technique in which phase of ZMs is used for watermark insertion and extraction. Due to the use of phase of ZMs, 100% detection ratio is achieved against any geometric and other signal processing attacks. To make the proposed technique fast, q-recursive method is used to compute the Zernike polynomials. The use of qrecursive method has also increased the transparency of watermark due to its better reconstruction ability as compared to traditional moment computation method. Through detailed experimentation, it has been confirmed that the proposed watermarking technique is fast, has more imperceptibility, less Bit Error Rate (BER) and more capacity as compared to traditional ZMs magnitude based watermarking technique.