The Application Of Reversible Digital Watermarking In High Capacity Information Hiding For Digital Images

Abstract:With the development of the digital watermarking, lossless digital watermarking technology has become an important research direction. Lossless digital watermarking has unique characteristic of lossless, also known as reversible or lossless digital watermarking, greatly expanding the application of digital watermarking technology. Lossless digital watermarking with specific functions of the watermark information embedded in the multimedia carrier to protect host media’s content and conveys messages secretly. In the extraction procedure, the marked media can be restored to the original state after the embedded watermark was be extracted. Lossless digital watermarking technology can be widely used in some specific areas that need watermark to achieve content protection and special requirements for the original integrity. Such as medical image applications, the medical image diagnosis of patient’s information as a watermark embedded in the corresponding diagnosis image. The reversibility guarantees that the original image can be got and used for high quality diagnosis and further processing. Lossless digital watermarking technology has very broad application prospects of the technology.This paper studies reversible digital watermarking technology with high capacity and used new method for the application of in covert communication. In order to improve the embedding capacity and the marked carrier’s visual quality, this paper proposed a method using integer wavelet transform and histogram shifting to achieve high capacity information hiding on the analysis of the existing lossless watermarking algorithm. Integer wavelet transform can be combined with the human visual system well, chooses the high frequency subbands to embed the watermark can obtain higher image quality. On the other hand, histogram shifting method has advantages of simple operation, and the embedding capacity can be predicted in advance, a novel reversible watermarking algorithm with high capacity based on integer wavelet transform was designed. This paper’s major work includes the following:(1) Study the digital watermarking technology especially for lossless digital watermarking technology, introduces the digital watermark technology origin, development, model and performance index, review the concept and algorithm of lossless digital watermarking;(2) Design a reversible digital watermarking algorithm based on integer wavelet transform, proposed a new solution to choose embedding parameters and prevent the overflow and underflow problem;(3) Using Matlab language to simulate the designed algorithm, some experiments based on natural images and medical images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is feasible.