Abstract

Data hiding and watermarking are considered one of the most important topics in cyber security. This article proposes an optimized method for embedding a watermark image in a cover medium (color image). First, the color of the image is separated into three components (RGB). Consequently, the discrete wavelet transform is applied to each component to obtain four bands (high–high, high–low, low–high, and low–low), resulting in 12 bands in total. By omitting the low–low band from each component, a new square matrix is formed from the rest bands to be used for the hiding process after adding keys to it. These keys are generated using a hybrid approach, combining two chaotic functions, namely Gaussian and exponential maps. The embedding matrix is divided into square blocks with a specific length, each of which is converted using Hessenberg transform into two matrices, P and H. For each block, a certain location within the H-matrix is used for embedding a secret value; the updated blocks are assembled, and the reverse process is performed. An optimization method is applied, through the application of the firework algorithm, on the set of the initial values that generate keys. Using an optimization procedure to obtain keys requires performing lowest possible change rate in an image and maintain the quality of the image. To analyze and test the efficiency of the proposed method, mean-square error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) measurements are calculated. Furthermore, the robustness of the watermark is computed by applying several attacks. The experimental results show that the value of the MSE is reduced by about 0.01 while the value of the PSNR is increased by about 1.25 on average. Moreover, the proposed method achieved a high-retrieval rate in comparison with the non-optimization approach.