Applications of Digital Image Watermarking Using RDWT and ICA

With the rapid development of a network multimediaenvironment,digital data can be distributed much faster and easier. To maintain a duplicate of any digital data is easier than before, the enforcement of digital copyright protection is an important issue. In recent years, watermarking has become an emerging area and many watermarking schemes have been proposed for copyright protection. Many literatures have reported about Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) watermarking techniques for data security. However, DWT based watermarking schemes are found to be less robust against image processing attacksand the shift variance of WPT causes inaccurate extraction. In this paper, an attempt is made to develop a watermarking scheme based on Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) and extraction using Independent Component analysis(ICA). Various ICA like FastICA, Radical ICA, Pearson ICA, Jade ICA, Maximum Likelihood ICA, Mean Field ICA and Kernel ICA are proposed and implemented for extraction. The results reveal that FastICA produces better Similarity Measure and Mutual Information over other ICA methods. To ascertain the effectiveness of proposed technique (RDWT with FastICA), it is implemented for various applications like Medical, Fingerprint and Satellite images. The results are presented and discussed.