In this paper, a robust and blind watermarking method is proposed, which is highly resistant to the common image watermarking attacks, such as noises, compression, and image quality enhancement processing. In this method, Arnold Cat map is used as a pre-processing on the host image, which increases the security and imperceptibility of watermark embedding with a strong gain factor. Moreover, two pseudo-noise strings with weak correlation are used as the symbol of each 0 or 1 bit of the watermark. Accordingly, the accuracy increases in detecting the status of watermark bits at extraction phase in comparison to using two random pseudo-noise strings. Moreover, to increase the robustness and further imperceptibility of the embedding, the Arnold Cat mapped image is subjected to non-overlapping block. Then, the high-frequency coefficients of the approximation sub-band of FDCuT transform are used as the embedding location for each block. Comparison of the proposed method with recent robust related works under the same experimental conditions indicates the superiority of the proposed method.

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