What is Digital Watermarking

In this chapter, a fragile watermarking scheme based on One-Dimensional Discrete Hartley Transform (1D-DHT) has been proposed to verify the authenticity of color images. One-Dimensional Discrete Hartley Transform (1D-DHT) converts each 1 x 2 sub-matrix of pixel components into transform domain. Watermark (along with a message digest MD) bits are embedded into the transformed components in varying proportion. To minimize the quality distortion, genetic algorithm (GA) based optimization is applied which yields the optimized component corresponding to each embedded component. Applying One-Dimensional Inverse Discrete Hartley Transform (1D-IDHT) on 1 x 2 sub-matrices of embedded components re-generates the pixel components in spatial domain. The reverse approach is followed by the recipient to retrieve back the watermark (along with the message digest MD) which in turn is compared against the re-computed Message Digest (MD') for authentication. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique offers variable payload and less distortion as compared to existing schemes.