An Adaptive Multi-objective Image Watermarking Scheme for QIM Using NSGA-II

A new robust watermarking method, named QIM-NSGA-II, is proposed based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) and quantization index modulation (QIM). The NSGA-II algorithm is utilized to find out the optimal embedding position and adaptive quantization step for embedding watermark into a carrier image in the framework of QIM. In the process of searching an optimal solution, the trade-off between robustness and image fidelity of the watermarked image is represented by the Pareto-Front discovered by NSGA-II. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme has a good robustness against common attacks, such as amplitude scaling, noise, filtering, cropping, JPEG compression.