Multibit quantization index modulation: A high-rate robust data-hiding method

Nowadays, the quantization index modulation (qim) principle is popular in digital watermarking due to its considerable performance advantages over spread-spectrum and low-bit(s) modulation. in a qim-based data-hiding scheme, it is a challenging task to embed multiple bits of information into the host signal. this work proposes a new model of qim, i.e., the mary amplitude modulation principle for multibit watermarking. the watermark embedding process may be divided into two phases. in the first phase, a binary watermark image is spatially dispersed using a sequence of numbers generated by a secret key. in the second phase, the host image is decomposed by lifting, and the encoded watermark bits are embedded into the high–low (hl) and low–high (lh) subbands of dwt-coefficients using m-ary amplitude modulation. the results of the simulation show that the robustness increases, at the cost of increased decoding complexity, for a high m-value. furthermore, this investigation has shown that the decoding complexity of higher m-values can be overcome at moderate n-values, while the robustness performance is maintained at satisfactorylevel.