Improved Fragile Watermarking Technique Using Modified LBP Operator

A method of information concealment known as digital watermarking protects multimedia material against unauthorized copying and dissemination by embedding the essential information in the original data. This paper presents an improved fragile watermarking method using a modified Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operator by using local pixel contrast for embedding the watermark. An improved LBP operator has been applied to the cover image to indicate rough and smooth blocks. Then the least significant bit embedding technique is used to embed watermarking bits in the cover image, in which 2–3 bits are embedded in the rough block and 1–2 bits in the smooth block, respectively. The efficiency and performance of this proposed technique are evaluated based on PSNR, MES, and payload. This method uses a watermark size of 128*128 to be embedded in a cover image of size 512*512. It gives a PSNR of 54.420 and an MSE of 0.234. The proposed technique achieves good invisibility, ensures better imperceptibility, and shows better robustness.