Novel digital image watermarking using DWT-DFT-SVD in YCbCr color space

Digital image authentication under varying transmission and acquisition conditions is very challenging and efficient watermarking is an effective approach to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a transform domain approach in YCbCr color space for enhancing the performance of a watermarking system, employing the unique combination of 2-Level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Individual stages of the system are examined and an attempt is made to improve each stage. YCbCr color space is utilized to make use of its decorrelation property in order to improve correlation between original and watermarked image. DWT stage selectively utilizes the horizontal and vertical detail coefficients of the 2-dimensional DWT of an image. The translation variance problem of the DWT is compensated in the following DFT stage, which also exploits the frequency characteristics of the image. Finally SVD is used to embed the watermark data. The method gives better results in terms of increased PSNR values and is able to withstand a variety of image processing attacks.

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