FPGA Implementation of an Image Watermarking Scheme based on Intensity Level Matching

The aim of this work is to develop FPGA architecture of such an image watermarking scheme that can overcome the tradeoffs among the major three qualities – imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. This proposed scheme, developed in spatial domain, can be performed to embed gray-scale watermark image into any single color-plane of a cover object. Embedding has been performed in such a manner that the watermark pixels of any particular shade can be inserted into cover image pixels having the same or contiguous shades. This way, the visual transparency of the embedded information has been improved. Efficiency of this proposed scheme has been assessed through some image quality metrics, and compared to the same of some new age image watermarking techniques. The comprehensive analysis asserts that this watermarking system is able to meet its goal successfully.