IMPACT OF FULL CONTEXT-BASED PREDICTION IN REVERSIBLE WATERMARKING OF IMAGES

Abstract

The recent surge in the growth of the internet results in offering of a wide range of web-based services, digital repositories and libraries, e-commerce, online decision support system etc. These applications make the digital assets like digital images, video, audio etc, easily accessible by ordinary people around the world for sharing, purchasing, distributing etc. As a result of this, such digital products are facing serious challenges like piracy, illegal redistribution, ownership claiming, forgery, theft etc. For this, some serious work needs to be done in order to maintain the availability of multimedia information and protect intellectual property of the creators, distributers, or simple owners of such data. This is an interesting challenge and this is probably why so much attention has been drawn toward the development of digital information protection schemes. Of the many approaches possible to protect visual data, digital watermarking is probably the one that has received most interest. In the digital watermarking, the reversible watermarking is not only embedding information data within the image which is insensible to human visual system, but it also recover the original image and extracts the authentic information in decoding phase. Digital watermarking is a method that has received a lot of attention in the past few years. A digital watermark can be described as a visible or preferably invisible identification code that is permanently embedded in the data. A general definition for watermarking can be given as: "Hiding of a secret message or information within an ordinary message and the extraction of it at its destination!”. By adding watermark, it produce a little distortion to the image, although it is invisible to humane eye, but in some application like medical and military application, even a little distortion cause serious limitation in the recovery of the system. The goal is to embed some information in the image without affecting its visual content that is extracting the embedded information at destination. This report attempts to embed the secret information by reversible prediction algorithm in the spatial domain watermarking techniques. Proposed framework allows embedding into the host image using prediction features while retaining the quality of the image and the performance of the privacy of the identity. Experimental results indicate that the reversible data hiding scheme outperforms other approaches in the literature in terms of payload capacity and marked image equality.