ENHANCED WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES USING SOFT COMPUTING

Abstract

Currently for the last ten years the research of stong digital watermarking methods is extremely important and has become popular, partly because of the large amount of data transmitted online and also the growing threats to the authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity of digital media. With the large number of malicious attacks, including noise addition, geometric-distortions, compression and many forms of tampering, digital data is more susceptible than ever. Because of this, there is a need for efficient, robust, and smart watermarking methods to get digital data secure during transmission. To address the need to grow challenges, this study develops a new watermarking method designed to protect digital images. The suggested scheme utilizes the hybrid functions of (1)Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and (2)Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) as well as an optimization tool called Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The reason to use the ABC algorithm is that it mimics the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bee swarms and it dynamically varies the scaling factors of (1) DWT and/or (2) SVD in embedding the watermark, thus optimizing both imperceptibility and robustness for the watermarked images. In using a hybrid DWT-SVD framework by embedding the watermark into transformed domains, the watermark is less imperceptible to the human visual system. In combination, while SVD provides the numerical stability of the watermarked images, DWT enables the resistance of image distortions. To conclude, the watermarking system created in this research study offers robust and scaleable protection for digital image content. It has a better performance profile, which is important for us or other users of our system, and it satisfies some DRM require ments. Therefore, this system is a viable option for real-world scenarios which require secure digital content authentication, ownership protection, and copyright management capabilities(Sharma et al., 2021)[1].