Keywords
Color image
Medical image watermarking
Dimension reduction
How to Cite
Abstract
Nowadays digital environment, the rapid duplication and unauthorized use of color images shared online have led to increasing concerns regarding copyright infringement and data security. Therefore, the development of effective and robust methods for protecting digital content has become critically important. In this study, an integrated digital watermarking method is proposed to ensure copyright protection and data security for both color and medical images. In the proposed approach, watermark embedding is performed by jointly applying Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the blue (B) color channel of the cover image. The watermark image is preprocessed using a dimension reduction technique and optimized through the Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm. The optimized watermark is then embedded into the cover image, and inverse transformations are applied to obtain the watermarked image. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on standard test images under various attack scenarios. Imperceptibility is assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), while robustness is measured using the Normalized Correlation (NC) and Bit Error Rate (BER) metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high imperceptibility and successfully preserves watermark information under different attacks. Comparisons with related studies in the literature indicate that the proposed approach is competitive and, in some cases, superior in terms of both imperceptibility and robustness. Consequently, the proposed method provides an effective and reliable digital watermarking solution for color images.
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