A Secure IWT Watermarking Technique using QR Decomposition and 2D Henon Maps

Watermarking techniques are employed for protecting copyrights, preventing digital thefts and providing proof-of-authentications, document integrity, tamper detection and localization. Therefore, strong imperceptible watermarking techniques provide an interesting research area of the present era. In this paper, we endeavour to improve capacity and imperceptibility of the watermark using Integer Wavelength Transform (IWT) with QR decomposition under a 2D Henon map. The host image is transformed using the Integer Wavelength Transform to produce a 2×2 block matrix, in which the top-left block is decomposed using the QR decomposition technique. The watermarking image is encrypted with a Henon map before embedding it into the decomposed part of the host image to enhance the security. The tests were conducted on sensitive Arabic text images and plausible results were achieved. It is shown that the proposed watermarking technique can be used for images in order to attain better tamper detection and localization.