Digital image watermarking using different levels of intermediate significant bits with ZigZag embedding approach

Abstract

The rapid growths of computer technologies have been increased over the last half century in terms of amount and complexity of data. Broadcasting of digital contents on the networks (especially Internet) has become more important and access to the data also has become much easier than before. Digital watermarking techniques are used to protect the copyrights of multimedia data by embedding secret information inside them. For example, embedding watermark in images, audios, and videos. Digital Image watermarking also has been using to detect original images against forged images by embedding an evidence of the owner of the digital image. Imperceptibility, on the other hand, is one of the problems in digital image watermarking which a repeated method in different bit planes of cover image has been presented to improve the imperceptibility of watermarking in both embedding and extracting processes. Moreover, embedding process aims to embed watermark in different bit planes by using a non- sequential method to improve security of image rather than simple sequential embedding.