High capacity image watermarking in the joint spatio-frequency domain

Watermarking techniques are proposed as a solution to copyright protection of digital media files. Watermarking algorithms are mainly concentrated on spatial or spectral domains. In this work, a robust and high capacity watermarking method that is based on spatio-frequency (SF) representations is presented. We use the discrete evolutionary transform (DET) to represent an image in the SF domain. A watermark is embedded onto selected coefficients in the joint SF domain. Hence by combining the advantages of spatial and spectral domain watermarking methods, a robust, invisible, secure and high capacity watermarking method is presented. Simulations results yield that the proposed algorithm is robust to many signal processing attacks and outperforms several previous watermarking techniques.