A Novel approach to Enhance Robustness in Digital Image Watermarking using Multiple Bit-planes of Intermediate Significant Bits Ali Sharifara Mohd Shafry Mohd Rahim Morteza Bashardoost Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia, faculty of computing Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Skudai, Johor, Malaysia a.sharifara@gmail.com shafryr@gmail.com morteza.bashardoost@gmail.com Abstract— the main aim of this paper is to introduce a novel approach to preserve digital images’ copyrights. Hence as ISB scheme was selected in relation to the approach in an attempt conquer the issues of robustness and imperceptibility in watermarked imagery. According to the literature review, embedding the aimed secret bits (Watermark) is a problematic issue inside a host image (normal 8-bit, grey-scale) in a sense to make it undetectable by the HVS (Human Visual System) in addition to the matter that it is predicted to receive any attacks. The suggested method here represents an improved scheme for the embedding of ISB which maintains the robustness and cultivates the rate of security by employing repeated bits in various bit planes over an irregular order and it develops the LSB technique specifically in circumstances where robustness and imperceptibility are main points of assessment. Digital image watermarking; Intermediate Significant Bit; robustness in watermarking;security; I. INTRODUCTION The huge fame gained by the World Wide Web over the past decades proves the commercial promise of presenting multimedia assets over the digital networks. As the commercial benefits look to implement digital networks in an attempt to represent digital media to get benefits, they maintain to possess a great interest in guarding the rights of ownership, and digital watermarking has been one of the solutions to this proposition so far. Protection of the copyright has been one of the problematic issues digital images have had, one that has made a lot of problems for the media [1]. In addition, data has the ability to be transferred in many ways like the formats of image, text, audio and video. As the data is being transmitted over a long distance range, illegal users may receive the data or try to manipulate it. Therefore, the authorized users may lose their data and because of this matter the issue of copyright protection has been brought up. II. DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING Digital watermark is a type of digital pattern or signal that it injected inside a digital image in an attempt to protect its ownership rights on digital, video, audio and image data. On the other hand, it can be employed to detect the digital documents that have been distributed illegally. In current years, the concept of digital watermarking has gained popularity because of its vast range of usage in the authentication of the contents and protection of the digital multimedia data`s legal ownership. Digital image watermarking can be classified into two main groups in regard to its domains of embedding that divided into frequency domains and spatial domains. Over the spatial domain, a watermark can be embedded to a host image by modifying the gray levels for some of the pixels of the host image, even though this data can be easily traced via computer analysis. Figure 1 shows various bit-planes of a digital image, where the watermark can be embedded. As it can be understood, when the rate for bit-planes (N) is which is implemented for watermarking rises, the watermarked image gets to be clearer. Therefore when we put 8 bit-planes, (N=8), the watermarked image will be completely perceptible. Figure 1. Different 8 bit-planes of a watermarked image. In the second class, that is frequency domain, watermark will be embedded inside transformed images` coefficients. Here we have a number of algorithms at hand like DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform), DCT 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia 978-0-7695-5133-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICICM.2013.13 22 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia 978-0-7695-5133-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICICM.2013.13 22 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia 978-0-7695-5133-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICICM.2013.13 22 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia 978-0-7695-5133-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICICM.2013.13 22 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia 978-0-7695-5133-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICICM.2013.13 22 2013 International Conference on Informatics and Creative Multimedia 978-0-7695-5133-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICICM.2013.13 22