A Robust Image Watermarking Scheme using Singular Value Decomposition

This paper presents a robust image watermarking scheme for multimedia copyright protection. In this work, host image is partitioned into four sub images. Watermark image such as ‘logo’ is embedded in the two of these sub images, in both D (singular and diagonal matrix) and U (left singular and orthogonal matrix) components of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of two sub images. Watermark image is embedded in the D component using Dither quantization. A copy of the watermark is embedded in the columns of U matrix using comparison of the coefficients of U matrix with respect to the watermark image. If extraction of watermark from D matrix is not complete, there is a fair amount of probability that it can be extracted from U matrix. The proposed algorithm is more secure and robust to various attacks, viz., JPEG2000 compression, JPEG compression, rotation, scaling, cropping, row-column blanking, row-column copying, salt and pepper noise, filtering and gamma correction. Superior experimental results are observed with the proposed algorithm over a recent scheme proposed by Chung et al. in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER), Normalized Cross correlation (NC) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).