A Novel Robust Method to Add Watermarks to Bitmap Images by Fading Technique
This addresses image copyright protection for digital media users, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing watermarking methods.
The paper tackles the problem of digital watermarking for image security by proposing a fading technique that merges a cover image with a watermark image at a 99:1 ratio, resulting in no perceptible difference to the human eye and excellent performance metrics (MSE, PSNR, SSIM).
Digital water marking is one of the essential fields in image security and copyright protection. The proposed technique in this paper was based on the principle of protecting images by hide an invisible watermark in the image. The technique starts with merging the cover image and the watermark image with suitable ratios, i.e., 99% from the cover image will be merged with 1% from the watermark image. Technically, the fading process is irreversible but with the proposed technique, the probability to reconstruct the original watermark image is great. There is no perceptible difference between the original and watermarked image by human eye. The experimental results show that the proposed technique proven its ability to hide images that have the same size of the cover image. Three performance measures were implemented to support the proposed techniques which are MSE, PSNR, and SSIM. Fortunately, all the three measures have excellent values.