A Hybrid Domain-Based Digital Watermarking Technique for Robust and Imperceptible Image Copyright Protection

This work provides a strong digital watermarking method to attain undetectable and robust watermark embedding by combining many domain transformations and decomposition methods. To guarantee good watermark embedding and retrieval, the technique uses Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), Onion Peel Decomposition (OPD), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and Singular Value Decomision (SVD). Using a strength value, the single values of the carrier picture are changed to incorporate the watermark, therefore guaranteeing low distortion and great imperceptibility. The sequence of transforms is reversed during extraction to faithfully retrieve the watermark. Under several assault scenarios—including JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, scaling, cropping, and blurring—a thorough investigation was done to assess resilience. Performance was evaluated using the normalised cross-correlation (NCC) metric—which measures the resemblance between the original and extracted watermark. With an average NCC of 0.99 over all attacks, the proposed system matched or surpassed present state-of- the-art methods. The technique also generated a strong Mean Structural Similarity Index Metric (MSSIM) of 0.9966, the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 4.2729, and the highest Peak Signal-to-- Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 36.0477.Comparatively with both random and non-random distribution approaches, comparison with average NCC values of 0.98 and 0.99 correspondingly indicated significant resilience. The random spread method exhibited higher resistance to blurring attacks, even if the non-random spread strategy was best in scaling and cropping attacks. Visual examinations confirmed considerable similarity between the watermarked and retrieved images under all attack scenarios. These results show how effectively the proposed approach balances imperceptibility and robustness, hence ensuring dependability for safe digital watermarking applications in demanding surroundings.