Exploring robust and blind watermarking approach of colour images in DWT-DCT-SVD domain for copyright protection

Abstract

This paper presents a new robust and invisible blind watermarking approach of colour images for copyright protection in hybrid DWT-DCT-SVD domain. In the proposed method, firstly the luminance component (Y) of the cover image is decomposed up to one level of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients and the low frequency band (LL) is transformed by discrete cosine transform (DCT). Then several selected low and intermediate frequency DCT coefficients of each block are extracted to generate a feature matrix and singular value decomposition (SVD) transform is applied to the feature matrix. Finally the watermark information is embedded by modifying the singular values of the feature matrix. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms some popular existing watermarking methods in robustness against median filtering, Gaussian filtering, salt and pepper noise, average filtering, Gaussian noise, histogram equalisation, and so on, especially in case of lossy JPEG compression in addition to good imperceptibility.