2025/11/13 by Anam, Rizal Khoirul
Computer Science · #Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption #Digital Media Forensic Detection #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Multimedia (cs.MM) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.10245
openalex publication_date 2025/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/11/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The proliferation of digital media necessitates robust methods for copyright protection and content authentication. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of digital image watermarking techniques implemented using the spatial domain (Least Significant Bit - LSB), the frequency domain (Discrete Fourier Transform - DFT), and a novel hybrid (LSB+DFT) approach. The core objective is to evaluate the trade-offs between imperceptibility (measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio - PSNR) and robustness (measured by Normalized Correlation - NC and Bit Error Rate - BER). We implemented these three techniques within a unified MATLAB-based experimental framework. The watermarked images were subjected to a battery of common image processing attacks, including JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, and salt-and-pepper noise, at varying intensities. Experimental results generated from standard image datasets (USC-SIPI) demonstrate that while LSB provides superior imperceptibility, it is extremely fragile. The DFT method offers significant robustness at the cost of visual quality. The proposed hybrid LSB+DFT technique, which leverages redundant embedding and a fallback extraction mechanism, is shown to provide the optimal balance, maintaining high visual fidelity while exhibiting superior resilience to all tested attacks.