Edinburgh Napier University

  Due to the increased number of cyberattacks, numerous researchers are motivated towards the design of such schemes that can hide digital information in a signal. Watermarking is one of the promising technologies that can protect digital information. However, traditional watermarking schemes are either slow or less secure. In this paper, a dynamic S-Box based efficient watermarking scheme is presented. The original image was extracted at the receiver’s end without any loss of sensitive information. Firstly, the Secure Hash Algorithm is applied to the original image for the generation of the initial condition. Piece Wise Linear Chaotic Map is then used to generate 16 × 16 dynamic Substitution Box (S-Box). As an additional security feature, the watermark is substituted through dynamic S-Box. Hence, it is hard for the eavesdroppers to attack the proposed scheme due to the dynamic nature of S-Box. Lastly, lifting wavelet transform is applied to the host image and the High Low and High High blocks of host image are replaced with least significant bits and most significant bits of the substituted watermark, respectively. Robustness, efficiency and security of the proposed scheme is verified using Structure Similarity Index, Structure Dissimilarity Index, Structure Content, Mutual Information, energy, entropy, correlation tests and classical attacks analysis.