GSA Driven Distributed Watermarking Technique using 4LSB Substitution

Abstract

A digital watermark technique is a unique signature used for copyright protection, data integrity, and ownership identification. The digital watermark can be visible, semi-visible, or completely invisible and can be fragile or semi-fragile. The proposed technique presents a gravitational search algorithm based on an invisible watermarking technique that embeds a digital watermark in host images in a distributed manner. The invisibility of the watermark restricts any detection and prediction of the watermark contents and location with the naked eye and keeps it invisible to the human visual system. Hence, make the alteration, removal, or replacement of the watermark difficult. The distributed placement enhances the security of the watermark twofold and limits the complete removal or replacement of the watermark by any random attempts. The proposed distributed watermarking is an optimal solution for embedding watermarks, which applies the gravitational search algorithm, using Newtonian principles, to identify the potential host pixels for watermark embedding. The proposed technique provides average values of hiding capacity of 35%, PSNR of 40 dB or higher, and SSIM of 0.90. The experimental result shows that the embedded watermark remains invisible, keeping the quality of the host image unaffected, and results in a high-quality host image with an embedded watermark.