Adaptive HDR Image Blind Watermarking Approach Based on Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform

Remarkable success has been recorded in the usage of digital watermarking which is aimed at protecting the intellectual property of multimedia content. In this paper, a new tone mapping attack-resistant high dynamic range (HDR) image zero-watermarking algorithm is proposed. In this algorithm extraction of stable and invariant features are extracted for efficient zero-watermarking through the application of the redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) to the HDR image. The first step involves transforming the HDR image to HVS color space, and RDWT is implemented using the V-channel so that the LL sub-band which contains the strong structure contents of the image is obtained. The second step involves dividing the LL sub-band into non-overlapping blocks, which are afterwards subjected to the process of transformation through the use of the singular value decomposition (SVD) so that the U matrix can be extracted. Third, the use of an Auto-Regressive (AR) prediction technique was employed in generating a local relationship model and comparison is done to facilitate the production of a binary feature mask. In the fourth process, hybrid chaotic mapping (HCM) is used to generate blended watermark so that the security of the watermark can be fortified. Lastly, the computation of an effective zero-watermark is achieved through the implementation of an exclusive-or operation on the blended watermark and the binary feature mask. Based on the results, the approach presented in this study demonstrated superior performance in terms of withstanding TM attacks and other attacks associated with image processing.