An Adaptive Implementation for DCT-Based Robust Watermarking with Genetic Algorithm

Application for robust watermarking is one of the major branches in digital rights management (DRM) systems and related researches. Based on existing metrics to evaluate the applicability of robust watermarking, it is generally agreed that three metrics, including the quality of watermarked contents, the survivability of extracted watermark after intentional or unintentional attacks, and the number of bits embedded, need to be considered. However, these three metrics conflict with each other. In this paper, in addition to quality and survivability discussed in literature, we take the number of embedded bits into account, thus adding the flexibility in implementation. With the aid of genetic algorithm, we designed an applicable implementation that will obtain the reasonable quality, acceptable survivability, and practical capacity after watermarking. Simulation results present the practical implementation and possible application of the proposed algorithm.