Fault tolerance in LWT-SVD based image watermarking systems using three module redundancy technique

Abstract Increasing the robustness, reliability and security of the digital image watermarking methods against image processing and geometrics attacks are a key issues especially for image copyright protection. Most of existing methods concentrate on increasing the robustness and/or security aspects. In this paper, a robust and reliable digital image watermarking method is proposed by combination of lifting wavelet transform and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) along with Three Module Redundancy (TMR) technique. Also to increase the security of the proposed method, at first, the watermark image is encrypted using improved Arnold transform. Then, SVD is applied to the encrypted watermark image. Using the TMR technique, the singular values of the encrypted watermark image are embedded in three wavelet subbands of the host image using appropriate scaling factors. To obtain the balance between robustness and imperceptibility, scaling factor of each subband is determined by Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. According to the evaluations, compared to existing works, the proposed method is robust, and also has a high imperceptibility. Also by employing TMR, as a fault tolerance mechanism, the proposed system is more reliable and can work properly in more situations compared to the state-of-the-art methods.