Applied Mathematical Sciences, Vol. 6, 2012, no.

73, 3607 - 3614

Optimization of Fidelity in Digital Image Watermarking

Using a New Genetic Algorithm
D. Venkatesan
School of Computing
SASTRA University, Thanjavur, India
venkatgowri@cse.sastra.edu
K. Kannan1 and S. Raja Balachandar2
School of Humanities and Sciences
SASTRA University, Thanjavur, India
1
kkannan@maths.sastra.edu
2
srbala09@gmail.com
Abstract
In this paper we present a New Genetic Algorithm based on Center of Mass Selection Operator (CMGA), to nd the optimum locations
for digital watermark insertion in a cover image, by focusing on the
issue of optimizing Fidelity. The various existing techniques based on
spatial and frequency domain suers with poor Fidelity problems. In
this paper we have used a center of mass selection operator based Genetic Algorithm, to investigate the variation of maximum tness based
on the higher PSNR value of watermarked image, against embedding
strength, number of genes, various payload of digital watermark. Our
experimental results show that, this New Genetic Algorithm provides
much better solutions than the simple Roulette-wheel based Genetic
Algorithm (RWGA).

Mathematics Subject Classification: 68U10

Keywords: Digital Image Watermarking; Genetic Algorithm; Center of
Mass Selection; Fidelity; PSNR

Introduction

Digital Image Watermarking is a technique for inserting information (the watermark) into an image, which can be later extracted or detected for variety

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D. Venkatesan, K. Kannan and S. Raja Balachandar

of purposes including identication and authentication purposes. Digital watermark is a short sequence of information (bits) embedded in a digital image
such that it is dicult to erase.
Properties of Watermarking [4]:
Embedding Eectiveness: It is the probability that it will succeed in embedding a watermark in a Image.
Data Payload: It is the amount of information that can embed in a single
image.
Blind vs. Informed Detection: An informed detector requires some information about the original image. A blind detector does not.
False positive Rate: It is the frequency with which it is expected to detect
watermarks in non watermarked images.
False Negative Rate: It is the frequency with which it is expected not to detect
watermarks in watermarked images.
Fidelity: It is the perceptual similarity between watermarked and original image.
Robustness: It is the ability to survive normal processing (eg. Lossy compression, noise reduction, etc.)
Security: It is its ability to resist hostile attacks specically designed to defeat
the purpose of the watermarks.
Watermarking Techniques [4]:
Spatial Domain Watermarking: Watermark embedded by directly modifying
the pixel values. Usually use spread spectrum approach.
Transform Domain Watermarking: Watermark embedded in the transform domain e.g., DCT, DFT, wavelet by modifying the coecients of global or block
transform
Few Applications of Digital Watermarking : Broadcast Monitoring, Owner
Identication, Proof of Ownership, Transaction Tracking, Content Authentication, and Copy Control.
In this paper a New Genetic Algorithm based on the Centre of Mass selection
operator , the standard single-point crossover operator , random mutation operator is used to optimize the delity of digital image watermarking. This
CMGA is capable of producing better quality solutions than the Simple Genetic Algorithm using roulette-wheel selection (RWGA)[13]. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows. In section II, a brief survey of various approaches
used to solve the Digital Image Watermarking (DIWM) is presented. In section III, we presented an introduction to Genetic Algorithm. In section IV, the
New Genetic Algorithm for optimizing the delity of DIWM is explained. Experimental results and analysis are presented in section V. Concluding remarks
are provided in section VI.

Optimization of fidelity in digital image watermarking

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A brief Literature Survey

Various techniques for digital image watermarking have been developed in

Spatial Domain and Frequency Domain by many of the Researchers. Spatial
domain approaches [11] are very simple to use and the earliest approaches
are based on the modication of pixel intensities. These approaches are less
robust against the attacks. While, the transform domain approaches insert
the watermark into transform coecients, such as discrete Fourier transform
(DFT) [16], discrete cosine transform (DCT) [1], and wavelet transform (WT)
[2,5,12] coecients.
Deng and Wang [7], propose a novel robust algorithm to embed a watermark into a still image in DCT domain. Huang[10], paper used a concept
of DCT and proposed a progressive watermarking technique with Genetic Algorithm. Shieh [15], presented an innovative watermarking based on Genetic
Algorithm in the Transform domain and it was robust against watermarking
attacks. Dengeun Lee [6], proposed a novel watermark extraction algorithm
based on DWT and Genetic Algorithm. Zhicheng[18], proposed a image watermarking based Genetic Algorithm for optimization in 8 * 8 domain to improve the robustness and imperceptibleness properties. Chen [3], proposed a
Genetic Algorithm based image authentication approach to improve the image quality of a protected image. Z.wai [17] was proposed a embedding and
extracting method with Genetic Algorithm based on DCT domain to avoid
the leak of watermark. Ali Al-Haj [1] described an imperceptible and a robust combined DWT-DCT digital image watermarking algorithm. Franco [8],
provided a DWT based digital watermarking for delity and robustness evaluation. Sachin Goyal [13,14], provided a small survey of digital watermarking
with Genetic Algorithm.

Genetic algorithm

Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a randomized search and optimization algorithm

which is adaptive and robust. It uses the natures concept of survival of the
ttest, to select the best individuals from the population of solutions. It will
exploit the historical information to speculate the new search points with performance improvement. It can nd the global optimum value by eciently
searching in the very large and complex search spaces. They use only three
simple operators to perform the search and optimization eciently. The selection operation is used to select the best t individuals for the next generation.
The crossover operation combine the features of parent solutions to create new
improved solutions. The mutation operation changes randomly some information to incorporate new features in the solutions. A more detailed information
on Genetic Algorithm can be found in [9].

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D. Venkatesan, K. Kannan and S. Raja Balachandar

A small survey of GA based applications, where some modications are

introduced into the basic operations. Goldberg [9], introduced some modications in the crossover operation, called Partially Matched Crossover(PMX),
Order Crossover(OX), Cyclic Crossover(CX) for solving the traveling salesman problem. He also suggested some modications to the mutation operation called inversion mutation, insertion mutation, displacement mutation,
reciprocal mutation and shift mutation which can be used to solve any optimization problem.In this paper we have introduced a new selection operation
called Center of Mass Selection to optimize the Fidelity of digital image water
marking

The New Genetic Algorithm for optimizing

Fidelity of Digital Image Watermarking

A. Representation and fitness evaluation

We have stored the digital image in two dimensional vector called cimage
and then converted it a one dimensional vector called cimage2. The digital
water mark is stored in a one dimensional vector called dwm (randomly generated strings of 0s and 1s ). The length of each chromosome (solution) is
taken as ve times the length of dwm. The population size is chosen as 100.
The initial population is generated randomly. For each solution,
(a)The watermark locations in the cover image is calculated as

x(i) =
chromosome(y + j) 2j ; where 1 i length(dwm);y= 0 ;
1 j k; y = y + k; k = length(chromosome)/length(dwm).
(b)Then for making the x(i) values within the variable range (512 * 512) ,
x(i) = 1 + x( ((variable range - 1 ) * x(i) )/ (1 - 2k ) )
(c) Then the water marked image is stored in a one dimensional array called
newcimage2 as follows.
newcimage2(i) = cimage2(i), for1 i n where n = length(cimage2).
(d) Let Es be the embedding strength which varies from 0.1 to 0.5
newcimage2(x(i)) = cimage2(x(i)) + Es * cimage2(x(i)) where 1 i length(dwm)
and dwm(i) = 1
newcimage2(x(i)) = cimage2(x(i)) - Es * cimage2(x(i)) where 1 i length(dwm)and
dwm(i) = 0
(e)Now the tness of each chromosome is calculated as per the following equations[5].
f(i) = 10 * log10( (max value) 2 /psnrsum);
where 1 i populationsize, max value = max(cimage2(i))

psnrsum = 1/n * (newcimage2(i) cimage2(i))2 ;
where n = length(cimage2)
B. Center of Mass selection operation

Optimization of fidelity in digital image watermarking

3611

Figure 1: (a) Original image (b) watermarked image

In each population, the string with the highest tness value is assumed to
be the center of Mass p c. From that all the other strings(chromosomes) are
selected by using the following formula.
pi new = ( pi c + round(m*r)/k)) mod 2 , for i = 1 to length(chromosome)
where, pi new is the value of the i th character in the new string pi c is the
i th character in the center of mass, m is the length(dwm), r is the normalized
random number, k is the iteration number.
C. Crossover and Mutation
We have used single point crossover with crossover probability of 0.9. We
will select two consecutive parents and the cross site is selected randomly.
After the cross site, the remaining characters in the parents get exchanged.
We have also used random mutation operator with probability 0.05. It will
randomly change some bits form 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0.

Experimental Results

We have used a new genetic algorithm based on Center of Mass Selection

Algorithm (CMGA) to nd out the desired locations for watermark insertion
for optimizing the delity. The digital watermark is generated randomly with
various sizes (16, 32, 56,112,128 and 256). The embedding strength is varied
from 0.1 to 0.5. The chromosome length is taken as ve times the watermark
size.
In this experiment, the variation of maximum tness corresponding to best
delity of watermarked image is tabulated with respect to dierent watermark
sizes and the dierent embedding strengths(ES). To compare the eciency of
the proposed algorithm with the standard roulette wheel selection based Genetic Algorithm (RWGA)[13], four standard benchmark images(Lena, Baboon,
Peppers, Fishing boat) with size 512 X 512 are chosen . Figure 1 gives the
original as well as the watermarked images with ES=0.5. Tables 1 and 2 show
that the eciency of the CMGA and RWGA for image Lena with respect to

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D. Venkatesan, K. Kannan and S. Raja Balachandar

Figure 2: Maximum tness Vs embedding strength for Baboon,pepper and

Fishing boat images

S.No.
1
2
3
4
5
6

Table 1: Maximum tness values using CMGA

Watermark
Maximum tness
Bits
ES=0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
16
98.131 98.131 98.131 98.131
32
98.131 98.131 98.131 98.131
56
98.131 98.131 98.131 98.131
112
79.134 73.113 69.591 67.093
128
79.134 73.113 69.591 67.093
256
75.860 71.352 67.831 65.332

0.5
98.131
98.131
98.131
65.155
65.155
63.394

embedding strength(ES) and maximum tness. It is observed that our method

has a higher tness value than RWGA for all the embedding strength values.
Figure 2 shows that our algorithm reaches higher tness value than RWGA
for other images Baboon, Peppers and Fishing boat when number of genes
560,560 and 640 respectively. The results show that our CMGA outperforms
RWGA in all respects.

3613

Optimization of fidelity in digital image watermarking

S.No.
1
2
3
4
5
6

Table 2: Maximum tness values using RWGA [13]

Watermark
Maximum tness
Bits
ES=0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
16
73.4850 68.2695 63.5633 61.2810
32
68.9753 63.9612 60.5623 56.4570
56
66.7266 62.2650 57.3567 54.2031
112
65.6401 59.6134 56.2511 53.8268
128
65.3751 59.1463 55.4706 53.1240
256
64.7660 58.2441 55.1922 52.6525

0.5
58.6833
55.9521
53.9854
51.8345
51.2231
50.4143

Conclusion

In this paper a new Genetic Algorithm (CMGA) based on center of mass

selection operator, has been proposed to nd out the suitable locations for
watermark insertion in a cover image by optimizing the delity. Our experimental results show that our algorithm performs better than the standard
Roulette Wheel based Genetic Algorithm (RWGA) approach in all cases. It
can be further extended by considering the additional robustness property in
a multi objective optimization model, which is ongoing.

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D. Venkatesan, K. Kannan and S. Raja Balachandar

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Received: March, 2012