PSO Based Lossless and Robust Image Watermarking using Integer Wavelet Transform

In recent days, the advances in the broadcasting of multimedia contents in digital format motivate to protect this digital multimedia content form illegal use, such as manipulation, duplication and redistribution. However, watermarking algorithms are designed to meet the requirements of different applications, because, various applications have various requirements. This paper intends to design a new watermarking algorithm with an aim of provision of a tradeoff between the robustness and imperceptibility and also to reduce the information loss. This approach applies Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) instead of conventional floating point wavelet transforms which are having main drawback of round of error. Then the most popular artificial intelligence technique, particle swarm optimization (PSO) used for optimization of watermarking strength. The strength of watermarking technique is directly related to the watermarking constant alpha. The PSO optimizes alpha values such that, the proposed approach achieves better robustness over various attacks and an also efficient imperceptibility. Numerous experiments are conducted over the proposed approach to evaluate the performance. The obtained experimental results demonstrates that the proposed approach is superior compared to conventional approach and is able to provide efficient resistance over Gaussian noise, sal