Exploring Discrete Haar Wavelet and Cosine Transforms for Accuracy-and Energy-Quality VLSI Watermarking Systems Design

Abstract

Digital watermarking conceals data within host images to safeguard against unauthorized distribution of multimedia content. It offers content protection and anti-piracy measures, maintaining content quality by embedding invisible information. This process involves inserting and extracting watermarks. We introduce a robust algorithm, combining discrete Haar wavelet transform (DHWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT), yielding effective watermarking with high resistance to extraction without data loss. This combination of transforms represents a hybrid approach that we call HyDHWCT in this work. Evaluations reveal our approach’s superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our hardware watermarking solution excels in robustness and energy efficiency, even under diverse attack scenarios. FPGA and ASIC assessments show our HyDHWCT’s exceptional area and power performance, with the algorithm achieving a lossless watermark extraction (NC = 1), outperforming prior methods in accuracy-quality, and energy-, and area-savings (approximately \(2.621\times \) and \(1.174\times \), respectively). Accuracy-quality results confirm a perfect extraction rate (NC = 1), ensuring 100% accuracy in watermark extraction.