An Efficient Semi-blind Watermarking Technique Based on ACM and DWT for Mitigating Integrity Attacks

Digital watermarking is an essential technology in multimedia and information processing, addressing the ever-mounting concerns related to data integrity and protecting intellectual property rights. In content authentication, copyright protection, and data integrity, digital watermarking plays a critical role. Nonetheless, the current application of digital watermarking faces crucial challenges, most notably adversarial attacks such as compression and noise interference, which pose substantial threats to the integrity of embedded watermarks. In this article, we introduce a semi-blind watermarking scheme that fuses the capabilities of the ACM and DWT techniques to facilitate the efficient embedding and extraction of watermarks in digital images. This approach achieves a trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility, thereby ensuring that the embedded watermark remains resilient against commonplace attacks, all while preserving the visual quality of the image. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of watermark invisibility and its robustness against common attacks, including compression, noise addition, and filtering. Our watermarking technique maintains imperceptibility, achieving an average PSNR of 53.95 dB and an SSIM of 0.99996. In computation complexity and resource allocation terms, the experiments prove that our proposed watermarking demands fewer computational resources, with embedding and extraction times clocking in at an astonishingly swift 0.01218 s and 0.006875 s, respectively.