Abstract
This paper develops a digital watermarking algorithm using an informed watermark retrieval architecture. The developed method uses the fractional Fourier transform to embed the watermark in the space-frequency domain and extracts the watermark using blind source separation techniques. The watermark embedding is further enhanced using a heuristic algorithm to increase the strength of the watermarking system. We use genetic algorithm to find the optimal fractional domain by minimizing the coefficient of RMSE between the input image and the watermarked image. The algorithm's performance against various common attacks, e.g., JPEG compression and Gaussian noise, is presented to estimate the algorithm's robustness.