Hidden Image Watermarking based on Frequency Domain Technique

Abstract

Digital media is one of the most shared, influenced and highly used forms of the medium in the 21stcentury. Its presence ranges from simple images, shared in a Peer-to-Peer network to a world-renowned newspaper that provides second to second update on events around the world at the comfort zone. With this ease-of-access and anonymity it is easier than ever to copy and claim someone else’s work as their own. This nefarious practice of copyright infringement has high stakes when monetization is involved, especially in a high-stake venture such as NFT (Non-fungible Token) based artworks that are not only meant to be unique but also should benefit the artists not the people who masquerades as the true owner of the said art. To avoid such malpractices, watermarking is one of the oldest yet most used methods of authentication techniques for images. It is more effective if it’s hidden in plain sight (most of the times within the image’s meta-data,) so that it wouldn’t affect the appearance of the image but provides the impact, nonetheless. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm based hidden image watermarking is implemented to focus more on domain frequency. Furthermore, Domain Frequency is extracted to transform the original image and to add the watermark. DCT is implemented to enhance the rate of watermark processing. The whole project, in their individual modules discuss Image processing, encoding the said output with the watermark image and decrypting the said resultant to verify the watermark. As said before, the applications are vast with the emerging technology of Web3 and blockchain backed projects.