A SIFT-based robust watermarking scheme in DWT-SVD domain using majority voting mechanism

Digital watermarking is an efficient technique for copyright protection in the current digital and network era. In this paper, a novel robust watermarking scheme is proposed based on singular value decomposition (SVD), Arnold scrambling (AS), scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and majority voting mechanism (MVM). The watermark is embedded into each image block for three times in a novel way to enhance the robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme, while Arnold scrambling is utilized to improve the security of the proposed method. During the extraction procedure, SIFT feature points are used to detect and correct possibly geometrical attacks, and majority voting mechanism is performed to enhance the accuracy of the extracted watermark. Our analyses and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme is not only robust to a wide range of common signal processing attacks (such as noise, compression and filtering attacks), but also has favorable resistance to geometrical attacks.