Novel Watermarking Methods Based on Frequency Domain and Singular Value Decomposition

Petr Cika,Martin Zukal

doi:10.26552/com.c.2013.2a.145-149

Abstract

Nowadays, the copyright laws protecting the digital content are getting quite common. One of the important things is to protect the original or compressed images against illegal use. Frequency domain watermarking methods are used in most cases in today's image- and videowatermarking algorithms. Especially Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) are used in watermarking algorithms. This paper deals with development of two novel digital image watermarking methods that use DWT with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and DCT with SVD. The paper includes step by step process of watermark embedding and extraction and testing of the watermark robustness. The robustness was tested with the Checkmark, one of the watermark benchmarking tools. Experimental results show that both schemes are robust against a lot of attacks and have very high data hiding capacity.

Highlights

Nowadays, most of digital images are stored in the digital form for future utilization
Invisible watermarks can be inserted in the spatial domain or in the transform domain [1]
This paper focuses on the invisible watermarks and techniques that use the transform domain of digital images for watermark insertion and are useful, for example, to secure the images in biomedical systems [4]

Summary

Introduction

Most of digital images are stored in the digital form for future utilization. The digital data protection against illegal use becomes still more important. There exist lots of methods which use the spatial domain for watermark insertion [2] and [3]. The most famous and firstly published method uses the least significant bits of the image data for watermark insertion. Most of these methods are not robust enough. This paper focuses on the invisible watermarks and techniques that use the transform domain of digital images for watermark insertion and are useful, for example, to secure the images in biomedical systems [4]. Experimental results described in last sections show that both of these methods are suitable for image data protection against illegal use

Common techniques used in watermarking systems

Quality parameters

Proposed watermarking methods

Evaluation of the proposed methods

Conclusion

Results of the test