المستخلص: |
Nowadays, the quantization index modulation (QIM) principle is popular in digital watermarking due to its considerable performance advantages over spread-spectrum and low-bit(s) modulation. In a QIM-based data-hiding scheme, it is a challenging task to embed multiple bits of information into the host signal. This work proposes a new model of QIM, i.e., the M-ary amplitude modulation principle for multibit watermarking. The watermark embedding process may be divided into two phases. In the first phase, a binary watermark image is spatially dispersed using a sequence of numbers generated by a secret key. In the second phase, the host image is decomposed by lifting, and the encoded watermark bits are embedded into the high–low (HL) and low–high (LH) sub bands of DWT-coefficients using M-ary amplitude modulation. The results of the simulation show that the robustness increases, at the cost of increased decoding complexity, for a high M-value. Furthermore, this investigation has shown that the decoding complexity of higher M-values can be overcome at moderate N-values, while the robustness performance is maintained at satisfactory level.
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