A novel robust digital image watermarking method using SVD and GA

Abstract

A novel evolutionary-based watermarking algorithm for digital images is proposed. Robustness and imperceptibility are two important properties in digital image watermarking which compete with each other. In this paper a DCT and SVD based intelligent algorithm is applied to make a tradeoff between these two properties. First of all, a cover image is divided into 8×8 blocks and some of them which are special ones are transformed to DCT domain. The singular value decomposition is applied to DCT coefficients and singular values change according to a binary watermark image. The binary watermark image is obtained by Genetic Algorithm to solve the optimization problem between robustness and imperceptibility. So the novelty of this method is image adaptability. Robustness of the proposed method against several attacks such as filtering, noise contamination, JPEG compression and some geometrical attacks is good. In comparison with a recently similar existing work, experimental results show improvement in both imperceptibility and robustness.