Robust digital watermarking using Contourlet Transform for coloured images

The article encompasses a data hiding technique using digital watermarking for images using Contourlet Transform (CT). In the proposed approach the watermark is a coloured image which is embedded into the highest frequency subband of the primary image in its Contourlet domain. The rendered result gives a clear corroboration that the method is beneficial in embedding larger data into the subbands and provides high robustness without affecting the primary (host) image perceptibility. The proposed method has been tested under various watermarking attacks and results are tabulated yielding improved results by using Contourlet Transform for watermarking when compared to other techniques like DWT and SVD. The proposed approach proves to accommodate a larger payload, and yet fulfil the need of high perceptibility of the primary image without much degradation due to the presence of the watermark is itself robust in that it can resist many attacks, and it can be useful for fingerprinting applications.