IET Image Processing

Research Article

ISSN 1751-9659
Quality metric-based fitness function for Received on 7th January 2015
Revised on 17th August 2015
robust watermarking optimisation with Bees Accepted on 12th September 2015
doi: 10.1049/iet-ipr.2015.0379
algorithm www.ietdl.org

Assem M. Abdelhakim 1, Hassan I. Saleh 1 ✉, Amin M. Nassar 2

1
Radiation Engineering Department, Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority, 3 Ahmed El Zomor, Cairo, Egypt
2
Electronics and Communication Department, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
✉ E-mail: h_i_saleh@hotmail.com

Abstract: The design of a robust watermarking technique has been always suffering from the conflict between the
watermark robustness and the quality of the watermarked image. In this study, the embedding strength parameters for
per-block image watermarking in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain are optimised. A fitness function is
proposed to best suit the optimisation problem. The optimum solution is selected based on the quality and the
robustness achieved using that solution. For a given image block, the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is used as a
quality metric to measure the imperceptibility for the watermarked block. However, the robustness cannot be
measured for a single watermark bit using traditional metrics. The proposed method uses the PSNR quality metric to
indicate the degree of robustness. Hence, optimum embedding in terms of quality and robustness can be achieved. To
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a recent watermarking technique is modified, and then used
as the embedding method to be optimised. The Bees algorithm is selected as the optimisation method and the
proposed fitness function is applied. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides enhanced
imperceptibility and robustness under different attacks.

1 Introduction includes the measurements of the factors to be optimised. Different

Digital watermarking is the process of embedding digital
information into a cover digital content such as image, audio,
video or text [1, 2]. Watermarking has been the key technology in
various critical applications due to the widespread use of
multimedia products. Some of the commonly known applications
of watermarking are: copyright protection, content authentication,
copy control, prevention of unauthorised distribution, broadcast
monitoring and tamper detection [3–8].
For any watermarking design process, there are three properties
conflicting with each other. These properties are: imperceptibility,
robustness and data payload [9]. The imperceptibility of the
watermark indicates its transparency property. Watermarks should
be perceptually invisible, unless it is meant to be visible, such as
companies’ logos. Robustness is the ability of the technique to
successfully extract the watermark without being degraded or
destroyed by attacks applied to the watermarked content. The data
payload or the capacity is the number of bits that can be inserted
into the host object. The application determines the importance of
one property over the others.
Robust watermarking techniques always suffer from the conflict
problem between the required robustness and the appropriate
imperceptibility. Watermark embedding is carried out by
modifying some of the host values either in spatial or transform
domain. A significant modification is required to achieve high
robustness against attacks, which in turn degrade the quality of the
watermarked host. The majority of robust watermarking techniques
embed the watermark in the transform domain because it provides
more robustness than those in the spatial domain [10]. However,
the quality is affected by the location of the modified coefficients
and the embedding strength.
Optimisation algorithms are exploited to offer the best
compromise between robustness and imperceptibility. It searches
for the best embedding parameters that optimise a given fitness
function. This fitness function is a user defined function that
fitness functions can lead to different optimum solutions.
Wei et al. [11] proposed a scheme to embed the watermark in the
DCT domain. An optimisation algorithm was used for selecting the
best coefficients where modifications took place. The method
considered only the robustness in its fitness function. The fidelity
was considered by setting a suitable embedding strength value.
Anwar et al. [12] proposed a watermarking method in the spatial
domain. The considered trade off was between the imperceptibility
and the payload. The method divided the cover and the watermark
images into equally sized blocks. Each block of the watermark
image was embedded into the most suitable block of the host
image. The selection of the blocks was carried out by an
optimisation algorithm in order to maximise only the
imperceptibility. Thus, the fitness function included only the
quality measurement, while the payload was considered through
experiments.
Zhang and Hu [13] used the curvelet transform for embedding the
watermark by modifying the coefficients that are larger than a
threshold value. Optimisation technique was employed to search
for the optimum threshold and embedding strength that maximise
both robustness and quality. Therefore, the fitness function was
computed using quality and robustness metrics. In that case, when
different metrics were involved in the fitness calculation,
weighting factors must be used to balance the function. These
weighting factors were determined experimentally.
Hsiang-Cheh et al. [14] designed a practical fitness function for
optimising robust watermarking technique in terms of robustness,
quality and capacity. Two weighting factors were used in order to
prevent the fitness value from drifting toward one of the
measurement values. In [15], the Fuzzy theory was introduced in
order to adaptively adjust the weighting factor.
Aslantas [16] proposed a watermarking scheme based on the
singular-value decomposition. The embedding was performed by
scaling the singular values of the host using multiple scaling
factors. These scaling factors were optimised to provide the

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maximum achievable robustness with the least distortion possible.
The normalised correlation was used as the same metric for
measuring robustness and quality. Hence, weighting factors were
not used in the fitness function because both measurements would
provide the same range of values.
Wang et al. [17] used a multi-objective optimisation algorithm for
image watermarking, where the fitness function is divided into
multiple objective functions. Each objective function would
provide only one measurement value. Thus, it could effectively
avoid the difficulty of determining the optimal weighting factors,
when different metrics are combined for evaluating the fitness
function.
In this paper, we propose to use a new fitness function to better
suit the optimisation problem. The optimisation algorithm is used
to search for the optimum embedding parameters for embedding
the watermark bits individually. The problem is that the robustness
for one watermark bit cannot be measured by traditional
robustness metrics. Hence, a new fitness function, based only on
the quality metric, is designed to maximise the robustness with the
least possible distortion. Experimental results show that the
proposed method achieves high robustness against common image
processing operations compared to other existing robust
watermarking techniques.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In Section 2, the
Bees optimisation algorithm is introduced. In Section 3, the
proposed work is described. Experimental results are demonstrated
in Section 4. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 5.
2 Bees optimisation algorithm
The Bees algorithm was introduced by Pham in [18]. It is a simple
population-based optimisation scheme that simulates the foraging
behaviour of the bees swarm. The position of a food source
represents a possible solution to the optimisation problem and the
quality of the source indicates the fitness of the associated solution.
The foraging process begins by sending scout bees to different
food sites searching for promising flower patches. Initially, the
selection of the food sites is carried out randomly. Then, each
scout bee returns to the hive carrying information about the food
source. The quality of the food source is measured by a waggle
dance performed by the scout bee. Then, according to the quality
of the visited sites, a condensed search is carried out around sites
with high-quality food sources. Also, other sites are selected
randomly for searching. Afterward, they all return to the hive to
deposit and qualify the food they carried. Then, the same
procedure is repeated until the food level is satisfying.
Fig. 1 shows the pseudo code of the Bees optimisation algorithm.
The algorithm is a function of several parameters including: the
number of scout Bees (n), the number of elite sites (e), the number
of Bees assigned to search near the best sites (Ne), the number of
Bees assigned to search randomly in other sites (Nr), and a
stopping criterion that must be set in order to end the iterations of
the algorithm. In this paper, we use the Bees optimisation
algorithm to obtain the optimum embedding parameters, as will be
illustrated in the following sections.
Fig. 1 Pseudo code of the Bees algorithm
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3 Proposed approach for optimal embedding
In this section, we describe our proposed work, which can be divided
into two parts. In the first part, the embedding and the extraction
methods are described, and in the second part the proposed fitness
function is explained.
3.1 Watermark embedding and extraction
In our proposed approach, the embedding process is based on a
recent watermarking technique presented in [19]. The method
takes advantage of the correlation between any two adjacent
blocks in the DCT domain. Two coefficients of the adjacent DCT
blocks, at the same position, are chosen for embedding one bit.
According to the watermark bit and the difference between the
two coefficients, one of the two coefficients is modified to bring
their difference in a specified range.
The embedding algorithm with the proposed modification is
illustrated in Fig. 2. The host image I of size N × M is divided
into 8 × 8 blocks. Then, each image block Im,n and its adjacent
block Im+1,n are transformed to the DCT domain; the transformed
DCT DCT
blocks in DCT domain are denoted by Im,n and Im+1,n ,
respectively. Note that m and n are the row and column indices of
an image block, respectively.
Selection of the coefficient’s position (i, j), where the embedding
modification takes place, is carried out in two steps. First, one of two
groups (Geven and Godd), each includes four pre-defined positions, is
selected according to the vertical position of the block Im,n. A
position is selected from Geven or Godd, if the block Im,n is located
at an even or odd vertical position, respectively. Second, a position
is selected from a group, by calculating the difference between the
two coefficients at each of the four positions. Then, the position
that gives the minimum absolute difference is chosen. The number
of the selected position (1–4), in the group, is stored as a key for
the watermark extraction.
The watermark bit Wm,n is embedded by adjusting the two
DCT
coefficients Im,n DCT
(i, j) and Im+1,n (i, j) according to the embedding
algorithm in Fig. 2. Two embedding strength parameters (k and p),
are optimised to be employed for the robustness purpose. The first
embedding strength (k) is to ensure that the absolute difference
between the two modified coefficients is large enough to provide
the required robustness. The second parameter ( p) determines how
much portion of the value k each coefficient can be adjusted with.
WDCT WDCT
Finally, the watermarked image blocks Im,n and Im+1,n are then
transformed back to the spatial domain by computing the inverse
DCT.
To extract the watermark, the DCT transform is applied to each
8 × 8 block of the watermarked image. Then, the coefficient’s
location is obtained using the key created at the embedding phase.
The watermark bit is extracted according to the following relation


WDCT
1 if (Im,n (i, j) − Im+1,n
WDCT
(i, j)) ≥ 0
wm,n =
0 Otherwise
3.2 Quality metric-based fitness function
This section describes the proposed fitness function that evaluates
quality and robustness of the watermarking technique using the
quality metric. The optimisation problem is to search for the
optimum embedding strength parameters (k and p) for embedding
one watermark bit. The optimum solution is the parameters that
achieve maximum robustness, under certain attacks, with the
minimum distortion possible.
Existing fitness functions require both quality and robustness
metrics. For embedding one bit, the quality of the resulted
watermarked block can be measured. However, the robustness of
one watermark bit, against a given attack, cannot be measured
using the common robustness metrics.
The proposed fitness function takes advantage of the conflict
between the quality and the robustness to reflect both metrics in a
IET Image Process., pp. 1–6
 Fig. 3 Proposed fitness function

Fig. 2 Pseudo code of the proposed modified embedding technique

Fig. 4 Pseudo code of the proposed ranking method between two solutions

single measure. It uses the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) quality

metric to estimate the degree of robustness. Relying on the fact that
larger embedding strength leads to more watermark robustness and
lower image quality, and vice versa. Then, the quality could be Table 1 Bees algorithm optimisation parameters
used to give an indication for the robustness. Bees parameter Value
In Fig. 3, the calculation of the proposed fitness function is
illustrated. A value referred to as Bit Match (BM) is used, which number of scout Bees (n) 30
is calculated according to (1). The BMi is the bit match, calculated number of elite sites (e) 8
between the embedded bit and the bit extracted from an attacked deployed Bees near one elite site (Ne) 3
number of sites explored randomly (Nr) 6
watermarked block by an attack number i. The counter value number of iterations 20
Nrobust counts the number of attacks that fail to alter the solution space K = [10, 11, …, 80]
watermarked bit. The Nrobust value is calculated using (2), where P = [0, 1, 2, …, 100]
Na is the total number of attacks. The minimum and maximum fitness function parameters attack 1: JPEG 20% QF
attack 2: Gaussian LPF
values for Nrobust are zero and Na, respectively, where the var. = 0.4
minimum value indicates that all the Na attacks succeeded and the

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 Table 2 Quality comparison between the proposed method and other
watermarking techniques in [17] and [19] in terms of PSNR (dB)

Cover image Das Wang Proposed method using

et al. et al.
[19] [17] Conventional Proposed
Fig. 5 Watermark logo fitness function fitness
l1 = l2 = 20 function

Baboon 39.14 37.40 44.30 43.82

Living room 40.81 38.18 42.08 45.57
Houses 38.39 37.43 41.61 43.43
Kiel 40.52 38.16 41.93 45.02
Lena 41.79 38.63 42.35 45.31
Light house 40.84 38.24 42.05 45.51
Peppers 41.69 38.96 42.27 46.05
Lake 40.11 38.20 42.31 44.57

maximum value indicates that all attacks failed to alter the

watermarked bit.

1 if embedded bit = extracted bit
BM = (1)
0 Otherwise


Na
Nrobust = BMi (2)
i=1

To illustrate how the solutions are ranked according to the proposed

fitness function, Fig. 4 shows the ranking procedure between two
solutions ([k p]i and [k p]j ). Solution i has better rank, if one of
three cases occurred: The first case indicates that solution i
provides robustness against more attacks than that of solution j.
The second case indicates that both solutions provide robustness
against all Na attacks. In this case, the solution with the higher
PSNR is selected as it provides higher quality in addition to the
attained robustness. The third case indicates that both solutions fail
to provide robustness against the same number of attacks. In this
case, due to the conflict between robustness and quality, the
solution with the lower PSNR would have higher robustness to

Fig. 7 Extracted watermark images from attacked watermarked Lena

Fig. 6 Host images and their watermarked images image and their BCR values

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 between the cover image I and the watermarked image IW using (3).

2552
PSNR = 10 log N M (3)
(1/(N × M )) i=1 j=1 (I(i, j) − IW (i, j))2
Fig. 8 Watermark used for multiple watermarking attack
Robustness against various attacks is measured by the Bit Correct
attacks, and is hence selected. The performance of the proposed Ratio (BCR) shown in (4). Where W and W′ are the embedded
approach is demonstrated in the following section. and the extracted watermark of size Nw × Mw, respectively.
NW MW
i=1 j=1 (W (i, j) ⊕ W ′ (j, j))
BCR = (4)
4 Experimental results NW × MW

In this section, simulation experiments are carried out in order to The watermark logo used in the embedding process is shown in
evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Eight standard Fig. 5. The host images and their corresponding watermarked
greyscale images of size 512 × 512 are selected as host images. A images, using the proposed approach, are shown in Fig. 6. As can
fixed watermark logo of size 32 × 32 bits is used for embedding. be seen, the differences between the hosts and their watermarked
The proposed technique can insert 63 × 64 bits inside a 512 × 512 versions are not noticeable.
host. Thus, the logo is duplicated three times for redundancy. The The commonly used fitness function [17] can be defined as
optimisation parameters of the Bees algorithm are shown in follows
Table 1. The optimisation target is to maximise the robustness
against two attacks (Na = 2). The first attack is the JPEG 
Na
compression with a quality factor 20, while the second attack is a F = PSNR + ln BCRn (5)
Gaussian low-pass filter with variance of 0.4. n=1
The PSNR is the most commonly used metric for evaluating the
quality of the watermarked images. It compares the similarity In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our defined fitness

Table 3 Robustness comparison between the proposed method and the methods in [17] and [19] in terms of average BCR over all the selected host
images for different attacks

Attack type Attack degree Das et al. Wang et al. Proposed method using
[19] [17]
Conventional fitness Proposed fitness
function l1 = l2 = 20 function

JPEG compression QF 10% 0.567 0.576 0.531 0.485

20% 0.729 0.674 0.930 0.977
30% 0.871 0.741 0.989 0.998
40% 0.941 0.799 0.999 0.999
50% 0.979 0.844 0.999 0.996
60% 0.993 0.894 1 0.999
70% 0.996 0.920 1 1
80% 0.996 0.952 1 1
median filter window size 2×2 0.794 0.842 0.949 0.917
3×3 0.829 0.712 0.970 0.948
4×4 0.714 0.597 0.885 0.843
7×7 0.579 0.529 0.659 0.614
9×9 0.523 0.518 0.521 0.517
average filter window size 2×2 0.800 0.866 0.948 0.923
3×3 0.835 0.658 0.979 0.963
4×4 0.725 0.565 0.892 0.863
7×7 0.566 0.508 0.615 0.594
9×9 0.508 0.504 0.465 0.470
Gaussian LPF window size 3×3 0.967 0.990 0.999 0.999
4×4 0.798 0.866 0.947 0.924
5×5 0.967 0.990 0.999 0.999
salt & pepper density 0.01 0.825 0.938 0.958 0.934
0.05 0.607 0.798 0.792 0.720
0.1 0.538 0.723 0.693 0.653
Gaussian noise of zero variance 0.001 0.636 0.826 0.817 0.752
mean 0.005 0.644 0.824 0.822 0.752
0.01 0.642 0.826 0.826 0.756
sharpening window size 3×3 0.848 0.984 0.986 0.977
Histogram equalisation 0.849 0.984 0.997 0.991
gamma correction gamma value 0.9 0.996 0.998 0.999 1
0.2 0.857 0.991 0.997 0.994
rescaling size 512→256→512 0.766 0.755 0.929 0.891
512→1024→512 0.996 0.999 1 1
Circular cropping centre at radius 256 0.855 0.817 0.927 0.929
[256, 256] 128 0.493 0.563 0.381 0.382
cropping cropped part Upper left quad. 0.823 0.845 0.996 0.994
Upper right quad. 0.859 0.841 0.995 0.992
Lower left quad. 0.850 0.837 0.987 0.985
Lower right quad. 0.827 0.833 0.986 0.983
rotation degree 0.3 0.746 0.633 0.896 0.858
0.5 0.621 0.541 0.713 0.685
0.7 0.550 0.515 0.587 0.580
multiple watermarking insertion method Radouane et al. [20] 0.996 0.999 1 1

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function, we apply the common function in (5) and compare the
watermarking performance with our proposed approach. As
explained above, this common fitness function cannot be used for
optimising embedding parameters for each watermark bit
individually. However, it is utilised to obtain the best solution that
is fixed for all the watermark bits. Hence, the difference in
characteristics between the host image blocks cannot be considered
in the embedding process. Moreover, the selection of the
weighting factors (l1, l2, …, lNa) is determined either
experimentally or heuristically. In our experiments, the values of
the weighting factors are set to 20 in order to obtain comparable
values between the quality and the robustness terms of the function.
We compare our proposed approach with the existing methods in
[17, 19]. Here, we use both our defined fitness function and to the
conventional fitness function described above. The different
techniques are compared in terms of PSNR, which is a commonly
used metric for evaluating the watermarking quality, and the
results are shown in Table 2. It can be seen that the quality
achieved using the proposed method outperforms that of the other
techniques.
In order to illustrate the effect of the attacks on detecting the
embedded watermark, Fig. 7 shows the extracted watermark
images from the attacked watermarked image. Here, we use the
Lena image. The BCR values between the extracted and the
embedded watermark indicate how much the extracted watermark
image can be distorted due to the applied attacks, as shown from
the table. It is observed that the higher distortion is reflected in a
lower BCR value and vice versa.
For the robustness comparison, fourteen attacks are considered as
the most common watermarking attacks and applied on the
watermarked images to test the watermark robustness. The attack
of multiple watermarking is performed by embedding, inside the
watermarked images, another watermark using insertion method
described in [20]. In Fig. 8, the watermark used for that attack is
shown. Table 3 shows the average BCR over the eight host images
(in Fig. 6) for each attack. It can be seen that the proposed method
is more robust against most of the applied attacks, compared to the
other methods. It is noted that the method presented by Wang
et al. in [17] provides more robustness against Salt and Pepper,
Gaussian noise and Sharpening attacks. However, our method
offers more robustness against the rest of the attacks, as shown in
Table 3. The results in the Table show that the conventional
fitness function provides a slight increase in robustness over that
of the proposed fitness function. However, the results in Tables 2
and 3 show that the proposed fitness function provides better
compromise between quality and robustness.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, a new fitness function was proposed to achieve
optimum compromise between quality and robustness for
embedding watermark bits individually. The embedding strength
parameters were optimised for each watermark bit to provide the
maximum robustness with the minimum possible distortion. In the
proposed fitness function, the robustness measured for one
watermark bit was estimated from the quality measurement
6 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
between the host and the watermarked image block. A recent
watermarking technique was modified, and then optimised using
the Bees algorithm with the proposed fitness function to enhance
the quality of the watermarked image and improve the robustness
of the watermark against attacks. The performance of the proposed
fitness function was compared with that of the traditional fitness
function. The results have shown that our method provides better
compromise between imperceptibility and robustness. Furthermore,
comparisons with other existing approaches have been provided.
Overall, it has been shown that the proposed approach outperforms
existing watermarking techniques in terms of image quality and
watermark robustness against attacks.
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