A robust image watermarking scheme with kinoform in hybrid NSCT and SVD domain

Abstract

In this paper, a novel image watermarking scheme using an encrypted kinoform in the hybrid nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) domain is presented. In the scheme, a watermark is firstly transformed into an encrypted kinoform with fractional Fourier transform and Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm. Then the host image is decomposed with NSCT and the low frequency sub-band is divided into nonoverlapping blocks. SVD is applied to every block. The kinoform is embedded into the low frequency NSCT coefficients by modifying the largest singular value of each block. To withstand geometric attacks, the geometric distortion parameters of the attacked watermarked image are computed first by the Zernike moment-based geometric correction method in the detection process. Then the mark kinoform is extracted from the recovered image. In comparison with other method, the proposed watermarking scheme offers better performances for imperceptibility. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed image watermarking is not only invisible but also robust against a variety of attacks including scaling, rotation, flipping, noise addition, filtering, JPEG compression, etc.