Region Aware Dct Domain Invisible Robust Blind Watermarking for Color Images

The multimedia revolution has made a strong impact on our society. The explosive growth of the Internet, the access to this digital information generates new opportunities and challenges. The ease of editing and duplication in digital domain created the concern of copyright protection for content providers. Various schemes to embed secondary data in the digital media are investigated to preserve copyright and to discourage unauthorized duplication: where digital watermarking is a viable solution. This thesis proposes a novel invisible watermarking scheme: a discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain based watermark embedding and blind extraction algorithm for copyright protection of the color images. Testing of the proposed watermarking scheme's robustness and security via different benchmarks proves its resilience to digital attacks. The detectors response, PSNR and RMSE results show that our algorithm has a better security performance than most of the existing algorithms. Mohanty, for his constructive ideas, support, and constant guidance and for sharing his wisdom in the field of digital watermarking throughout the course of this research. I would sincerely like to thank my co-major professor, Dr. Elias Kougianos, for his support at various phases of my research work. I would also like to thank my committee member, Dr. Murali Varanasi from electrical engineering department. for his time and support. I want to thank my colleagues Dhruva at the VLSI Design and CAD laboratory [VDCL] for their support during my graduate studies. I am also grateful to all the faculty and staff of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering for their support and help. I would also like to thank my friends Chiranjeevi, Swapnil, Sunil for their constant encouragement throughout my master's program. I would like to take this moment to thank God with whom everything is possible.