Robust Invisible Digital Image Watermarking Using Hybrid Scheme

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is a technique to protect copyright of the image owner in the world of digital communication, and robustness is the major property to be addressed effectively. We propose an invisible hybrid watermarking scheme which is composed of blind and non-blind watermarking techniques. First, blind scheme is used as inner watermarking scheme and then non-blind watermarking scheme as outer watermarking scheme. A secret binary image is taken as a watermark and is embedded in an inner cover image using discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) with the help of the blind watermarking scheme in association with predefined binary digit sequence block and gain factor $${\varvec{\upalpha }}$$ to get inner watermarked image. Then, this inner watermarked image is embedded into an outer cover image using DWT and singular value decomposition by non-blind watermarking technique to get hybrid watermarked image. On the contrary, to extract the secret binary image, first non-blind watermark extraction and then blind watermark extraction techniques are used. From the experimental results, it is shown that this hybrid watermarking approach is robust against—rotation, JPEG compression, salt and pepper noise, Gaussian noise, speckle noise and Poisson noise.