Dual DCT-DWT-SVD digital watermarking algorithm based on particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Robust invisible watermarking plays an important role in copyright protection. Such watermarking has high requirements for robustness and security, and transparency and capacity cannot be ignored. Although there are many algorithms using singular value decomposition, most algorithms do not take security and reliability into account. Moreover, a meaningful watermark cannot be extracted under some attacks, resulting in the failure of copyright protection. In this paper, combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO), a secure and robust dual-embedded watermarking algorithm is proposed. First, the watermark image is encrypted by the generalized Arnold transform, then the original host image and the encrypted watermark image are processed by discrete cosine transform and multi-level discrete wavelet transform, and the singular values of the watermark image are embedded into the low-frequency and high-frequency regions of the host image, respectively. In addition, the embedding factor matrices are optimized by PSO. The simulation results based on the normal and medical host and watermark images show that the algorithm can meet the four basic characteristics of the watermarking algorithm. Moreover, the proposed watermarking algorithm has high capacity and good robustness, and can extract watermark with good visual effect under most attacks, so it can be used in copyright protection.