Title: DIP-QGA: a secure and robust watermarking technique based on direct image projection and quantum genetic algorithm

Authors: Djalila Belkebir

Addresses: Department Computer Science and Information Technologies, Université Kasdi Merbah Ouargla (UKMO), Ghardaia Road, BP. 511, 30,000, Algeria

Abstract: This paper presents three novel methods for hiding and extracting a watermark. The strategy of the first method is to project pixels into a new image. The key is a combination of the rotation and distance related to the viewer. The new pixel positions resulted from the direct image projection (DIP) are then used to hide the secret message. The aim of the second method relies on improving the security of a message against image manipulations (i.e., histogram analysis and RS steganalysis) where a combination between DIP and genetic algorithm (DIP-GA) is done. After that, we highlight the main challenges and issues that occur from the use of GA. Due to that, we propose the main contribution in our paper which is the use of quantum genetic algorithm (QGA) in the DIP method (DIP-QGA). QGA is based on the concepts and principles of quantum computing, such as quantum bits, quantum gates, and superposition of states. We evaluate our proposal's performance on the USC-SIPI dataset As a result, an improvement in PNSR and MSE is obtained (90.15% and 94.34% respectively).

Keywords: direct image projection; DIP; steganography; watermarking; quantum computing; genetic algorithms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2023.128814

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2023 Vol.20 No.3/4, pp.221 - 247

Received: 28 Jan 2021
Accepted: 16 Apr 2021
Published online: 07 Feb 2023 *

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