A Robust Evolutionary Based Digital Image Watermarking Technique in DCT Domain

Digital watermarking techniques are used for the digital right managements and copyright protection. As known, it is a big deal in watermarking systems to make a good trade of between the robustness and imperceptibility. This paper presents a watermarking algorithm in the DCT domain using an evolutionary algorithm to satisfy both of robustness and imperceptibility. We employ a genetic-based algorithm to select pairs in DCT coefficients and insert watermark bit according to mathematical relation between selected coefficients in each 8×8 DCT block of image. The proposed method has been implemented and tested under various attacks including JPEG compression, additive noise distortion, and image filtering. The achieved results show that image remains imperceptible while the watermark survives the attacks especially in case of JPEG compression.