Blind image watermarking in canonical and cepstrum domains based on 4-connected t-o'clock scrambling

Copyright protection of multimedia content is confronted with great challenges such as easy access to the Internet. Digital watermarking is widely applicable technique for copyright protection of multimedia contents. In this paper, a blind symmetric watermarking method in canonical and cepstrum domains based on four-connected t-o'clock scrambling is proposed. Initially, the watermark image is scrambled using the four-connected t-o'clock method to enhance the security. Then, the rotation operation is applied to the host image to extract the region where the watermark bits are embedded. After that, discrete linear canonical transform (DLCT) is applied to the extracted region to obtain the DLCT region. Cepstrum transform (CT) is performed on DLCT region to attain CT region. The CT region is then divided into non-overlapping blocks. The watermark bits are inserted into each block using max-heap and min-heap tree property. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method shows high robustness against numerous attacks. Moreover, it produces high quality watermarked images and provides high security. Furthermore, it has superior performance to recent methods in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and security.