Image watermarking using least significant bit and Canny edge detection

Abstract

With the advancement in information technology, digital data stealing and duplication have become easier. Over a trillion bytes of data are generated and shared on social media through the internet in a single day, and the authenticity of digital data is currently a major problem. Cryptography and image watermarking are domains that provide multiple security services, such as authenticity, integrity, and privacy. In this paper, a digital image watermarking technique is proposed that employs the least significant bit (LSB) and canny edge detection method. The proposed method provides better security services and it is computationally less expensive, which is the demand of today’s world. The major contribution of this method is to find suitable places for watermarking embedding and provides additional watermark security by scrambling the watermark image. A digital image is divided into non-overlapping blocks, and the gradient is calculated for each block. Then convolution masks are applied to find the gradient direction and magnitude, and non-maximum suppression is applied. Finally, LSB is used to embed the watermark in the hysteresis step. Furthermore, additional security is provided by scrambling the watermark signal using our chaotic substitution box. The proposed technique is more secure because of LSB’s high payload and watermark embedding feature after a canny edge detection filter. The canny edge gradient direction and magnitude find how many bits will be embedded. To test the performance of the proposed technique, several image processing, and geometrical attacks are performed. The proposed method shows high robustness to image processing and geometrical attacks.