A publicly verifiable watermarking scheme based on quantum chaos and DWT–DCT

Abstract

One of the problems faced by the internet consumer in today’s data age is protection of digital rights or ownership of intellectual property (IP) due to multi-fold sharing of data without consent. As a result, anti-piracy, a domain of robust IP protection has become a cardinal subject of research in system design. In this regards, watermarking has emerged as one of the best protection of authorship since it provides protection against tampering without any perceivable change in the multimedia content. This research paper focuses on developing a robust watermarking scheme. The proposed approach employs quantum chaos based encryption algorithm having low time complexity and optimized entropy values thereby reducing the chances of statistical attacks. In addition, SHA-3 is used for creating the digest as it affords easier hardware implementation and high security. DCT–DWT hybrid model is used for embedding watermark to further enhance robustness and RC4 with quantum chaos coupled with neighbouring coupled map lattice sequence as key for allocating random position to watermark pixels. The scheme provides improved results against existing noise based geometric attacks, universal image quality index and visual assessments in comparison to other mechanism in literature.