A Nested Digital Watermarking Scheme Using GARN with DWT

Abstract

Copyright infringement is undoubtedly one of the major challenges in the film and TV industries over the years but has become even more pervasive lately as a result of technological advancement. This has made it possible to decode hitherto, hard-encoded, or encrypted multimedia content resulting in a lot of losses to companies in such industries. Digital watermarking, which is, a process of embedding a piece of code or information in multimedia elements either covertly or visibly to provide copyright information is one way to show proof of ownership when taking legal action against an infringement. That is, digital watermarking can play a very important role in copyright protection. Also, it is possible to encrypt some copyright information to make it unreadable to adversaries who might reveal what has been watermarked. This study presents a nested digital watermarking scheme that utilizes the crossover and mutation properties of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and leverages the chaotic nature of the Residue Number (RN) System (RNS) to encrypt a covert image. Furthermore, this encrypted image is invisibly embedded in a video by decomposing the video into frames using the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Thus, we perform image watermarking after which, we perform the video watermarking using the watermarked image which in itself is ciphered thereby, making it a nested process. The encrypted image can contain hidden information that is not visible to attackers who may attempt to distort its content if it is discovered in order to prevent legal suits against copyright infringement. An analysis of the simulated results reveals that the proposed nested watermarked scheme modestly outperforms similar existing schemes in terms of perceptibility and robustness