Image Watermarking based on Huffman Coding and Laplace Sharpening

Abstract

In this paper, an algorithm through which we can embed more data than the
regular methods under spatial domain is introduced. We compressed the secret data
using Huffman coding and then this compressed data is embedded using laplacian
sharpening method.
We used Laplace filters to determine the effective hiding places, then based on
threshold value we found the places with the highest values acquired from these filters
for embedding the watermark. In this work our aim is increasing the capacity of
information which is to be embedded by using Huffman code and at the same time
increasing the security of the algorithm by hiding data in the places that have highest
values of edges and less noticeable.
The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using detection
techniques such as Peak Signal- to- Noise Ratio (PSNR) to measure the distortion,
Similarity Correlation between the cover-image and watermarked image, and Bit
Error Rate (BER) is used to measure the robustness. The sensitivity against attacks on
the watermarked image is investigated. The types of attacks applied are: Laplacian
sharpening, Median filtering, Salt & Peppers Noise and Rotating attack. The results
show that the proposed algorithm can resist Laplacain sharpening with any sharpening
parameter k, besides laplacian good result according to some other types of attacks is
achieved.