Singular Value Decomposition and Discrete Cosine Transform based Image Watermarking

Abstract: Rapid evolution of digital technology has improved the ease of access to digital information enabling reliable, faster and efficient storage, transfer and processing of digital data. It also leads to the consequence of making the illegal production and redistribution of digital media easy and undetectable. Hence, the risk of copyright violation of multimedia data has increased due to the enormous growth of computer networks that provides fast and error free transmission of any unauthorized duplicate and possibly manipulated copy of multimedia information. One possible solution may be to embed a secondary signal or pattern into the image that is not perceivable and is mixed so well with the original digital data that it is inseparable and remains unaffected against any kind of multimedia signal processing. This embedded secondary information is digital watermark which is, in general, a visible or invisible identification code that may contain some information about the intended recipient, the lawful owner or author of the original data, its copyright etc. in the form of textual data or image. In order to be effective for copyright protection, digital watermark must be robust which are difficult to remove from the object in which they are embedded despite a variety of possible attacks. Several types of watermarking algorithms have been developed so far each of which has its own advantages and limitations. Among these, recently Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based watermarking algorithms have attracted researchers due to its simplicity and some attractive mathematical properties of SVD. Here a number of pure and hybrid SVD based watermarking schemes have been investigated and finally a RST invariant modified SVD and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based algorithm has been developed. A preprocessing step before the watermark extraction has been proposed which makes the algorithm resilient to geometric attack i.e. RST attack. Performance of this watermarking scheme has been analyzed by evaluating the robustness of the algorithm against geometric attack including rotation, scaling, translation (RST) and some other attacks. Experimental results have been compared with existing algorithm which seems to be promising.