Abstract

The main objective of watermarking method is to improve the robustness and imperceptibility. This paper introduces an improved CRT watermarking method using absolute value of interpolated wavelet coefficients aiming to improve the imperceptibility and robustness. The standard CRT method embeds the watermark bits on the blocks of pixels evenly. Hence, it can significantly reduce the quality of watermarked images when the watermark lies on the homogeneous area. Otherwise, the proposed method is embedding the watermark bits on the heterogeneous area by sorting the absolute magnitude of wavelet coefficients descending. The waveletcoefficients are selected from high frequency wavelet sub band HH. This scheme is able to determine the appropriate embedding location in certain range of value. The watermark bits are then embedding on the selectedpixel value using CRT scheme. The result shows that the average imperceptibility value the CRT is 0.9980 while the proposed method has average value of 0.9993. On robustness against compression, the proposed method achieves better result compared to the CRT with the average NC values of 0.7916 higher than the CRT value of 0.7530. These prove that the proposed method has better performance in term of imperceptibility and robustness against compression than the CRT method.