Optimized Image Watermarking Scheme using Ant Colony Algorithm

The trend of sharing digital content over the Internet exposes it to various risks that can compromise its authenticity, integrity, and ownership rights. As a result, robust watermarking schemes have emerged to address these concerns while respecting Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection measures. These schemes enable the secure transmission of copyrighted content and digital data. This paper presents a unique investigation into a watermarking scheme that integrates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain for digital images. The objective is to incorporate the watermark in the coefficients of host images in such a manner that it is visually imperceptible and preserves the robustness of the watermarking scheme. For this purpose, we have employed multiple scaling factors for embedding the watermark. Our experimentation involves four grayscale host images, and we compare the proposed watermarking scheme against other techniques in same domain. The results validate that our approach surpasses alternative methods, satisfying all the necessary criteria for an optimized and resilient watermarking solution.