A new digital watermarking model using honey encryption and reversible cellular automata

Watermarking is the process of embedding and extracting a watermark design on a digital cover to prove the image's copyright or ownership, thereby securing the image's authenticity. The proposed method in this paper uses a combination of honey encryption and reversible cellular automata for image watermarking. This method has two main phases: In the first phase, first, the initial matrix of the image is converted to a vector form. Then, the image vector is initially diffused using the XOR operator. After that, the initial key space is created in the context of honey encryption. Subsequently, the diffusion matrix transformation function is applied according to honey encryption and the key. Finally, the reversible cellular automata transformation is performed on the encrypted matrix. In the second phase, the matrix resulting from the previous step is stored in the cover image. For this purpose, the discrete wavelet transform is used to perform watermarking without changing the visual information of the image. This method has been able to minimize the changes in the cover image information and maximize the level of confidentiality of the information. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the compared methods in terms of imperceptibility, achieving a significantly lower mean squared error of 13.55 and mean absolute error of 3.05, and a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio of 36.89. Furthermore, normalized correlation analysis of the proposed method exhibits its higher robustness against various attacks, including noise and JPEG compression than the compared approaches.