Robust self embedding watermarking technique in the DWT domain for digital colored images

In this work, a robust watermarking algorithm is proposed for colored digital images. The 24 bits/pixel RGB images are converted to YCbCr color format, and the Y part is converted to Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The resulted LL part is resized to the original size of the host image and its blocks are scrambled using certain key. The watermark is another copy of the LL part and its pixels are, also, scrambled and each pixel is embedded in one of the scrambled blocks of the LL part. The algorithm takes into account the Human Visual System via relating the embedding process to the intensity of each block of the host image. We have used the average PSNR as a quality measure for the embedding stage. In all our experiments we got more than 68 dB which satisfies the PSNR bench mark. Also we got an average value of 0.15 for MAE, which is the robustness measure. This means that our algorithm is very robust and the watermark is still recognizable.