Efficient digital image watermarking for mobile applications by optimising the spread spectrum technique

Abstract

In this paper, the spread spectrum watermarking in wavelet domain is optimised by using a number of techniques to make it more efficient when executed by a platform running on mobile devices. The proposed techniques can be executed efficiently and consume less computational and power resources as compared to the conventional spread spectrum-based watermarking. The proposed technique represents binary bits in the watermark using symbols, wherein each symbol represents at least 2 binary bits. A symbol is then mapped into a pseudo noise sequence and embedded in the digital image. Our analytical results show that our schemes reduce the number of operations required for watermarking by ∼50%, while our experimental results show that our schemes save about ∼59 and ∼67% in processing time and energy consumption, respectively.

Keywords:

• Watermarking
• Image processing
• Image copyright
• Spread spectrum

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, National Science, Technology and Innovation plan (NSTIP) grant numbers 32–702 and 34–988.