Capacity and quality improvement in blind second generation watermarking

For digital image watermarking scheme, to be an effective tool for intellectual property protection, it must satisfy the requirements of image quality, watermark robustness and capacity, embedding security and extraction flexibility. Towards these requirements, this paper introduces a high-capacity second generation based blind watermarking scheme for protection of intellectual property, which takes the consideration of good image quality. In the proposed scheme, the host image is normalized by fast technique to resist geometric attacks and reduce the computational time. The normalized image is then transformed using parametric bi-orthogonal integer lifting wavelet transform (LWT) to increase security. The high-capacity watermark is embedded carefully into the salient features by utilizing least significant bits (LSBs) method to maximize the robustness and quality. Experimental results show the reliability of the proposed scheme against variety kinds of attacks including image processing attacks and geometric attacks.