Providing robust and reversible watermarking algorithm and detection of malicious manipulation

Abstract

In this article, due to the importance of embedding encrypted information in the image, a watermarking method is proposed based on local statistics in pixels. The advantages of the proposed method include its complete reversibility and very high security, which is due to the use of the quadtree concept, finding similar parts in the image, and embedding information in low‐energy and less significant pixels. This method is an alternative and simplifier of the quadtree method, dividing the image into identical non‐overlapping blocks and then choosing the block with less energy as more suitable for watermarking. Also, two criteria of mean‐squared‐error and peak signal‐to‐noise ratio (PSNR) have been calculated and the PSNR shows that image quality has not changed too much after hiding the information than the original image. It should be noted that since the proposed method is applied to black and white images, the result can be generalized to different color channels in the image, and color images have more visible capabilities in terms of cached memory than black and white images because they contain three dimensions of information.