Robust blind image watermarking using DNA-encoding and discrete wavelet transforms

Copyright protection techniques are in great demand due to the widespread illegal copying and communication of digital media. Due to their popularity, various watermarking methods have been proposed lately for digital images. Wavelet-based embedding techniques gained a lot of attention since they provide the perfect balance between imperceptibility and robustness. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for hiding the complement of a DNA-encoded watermark data into the 3rd level resolution of the wavelet decomposition of a true color image. It applies a quantization operation on the sorted detail coefficients for an enhanced invisible embedding. The extraction process is carried out blindly without the need to refer to the original host image. Experimental results highlighted the excellent invisibility performance of the proposed algorithm. In addition, more than 90% of the embedded watermark survived even under high compression ratios. This outstanding performance continues in comparison with a number of similar methods.