Securing Images with Frequency Domain Haar Wavelet Transformation: A Compound Mapped Watermarking Approach
Raji Pandurangan, Thangam Rajamani, T. Sripriya, Raju Kolluri · IETE Journal of Research · 2025
The widespread use of smartphones and digital cameras has made digital image security and authentication significance for producers and consumers. Although many methods of digital watermarking have been suggested to address the increasing issue of internet piracy, insufficient attention has been paid to their effective implementation for real-time processing in hardware. Therefore, the hardware implementation of compound mapped watermarking using frequency domain HAAR wavelet transformation is proposed in this paper for a grayscale and a color image (FDHWT-WMI). The proposed watermarking scheme contains key generation, embedding and extraction. The Parameter Randomization Approach (PRA) is used in the key generation step to obtain data from the host, watermark images and hash them to produce the secret key. In embedding phase, Frequency Domain Haar Wavelet Transformation (FDHWT) technique is used to hide the watermark details in host imagery. The secret keys are extracting from hidden image with the help of Mapping Randomization Approach (MRA) in extraction phase. Then, the original watermarking image is reconstructed using extraction method to extract the watermark imageries. The secret key is utilized for authentication throughout the extraction process to solve the false positive problem (FPP). The proposed approach is executed in MATLAB and its efficiency is evaluated using performance metrics, like embedding capacity, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), normalized cross correlation (NCC), image quality, extraction time. Then, the proposed FDHWT-WMI method achieves 19.6%, 16.37% and 14.6% higher PSNR compared with the existing methods.