SVD-based digital image watermarking using adaptive generated watermark

Abstract

In this paper, an evolutionary-based algorithm for digital image watermarking is proposed. Robustness and imperceptibility are two important properties of digital image watermarking which conflict with each other. A singular value decomposition (SVD)-based intelligent algorithm is applied to make a trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility. In the proposed algorithm, first, the original image is divided into 8×8 blocks. Then some special blocks are transformed into discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. SVD decomposition of DCT coefficients of special blocks is the next stage of the method. Finally, a binary watermark image is embedded into the singular values by a quantisation method. The major property of the proposed method is the generation of a binary watermark image using genetic algorithm to solve the optimisation problem between robustness and imperceptibility. So the watermark could be variable and image adaptive. The simulation results show improvement in robustness of the proposed method against several attacks such as noise contamination, filtering, joint photographic experts group (JPEG) compression and some geometrical attacks like cropping, rotation and rescaling in comparison with a recently similar existing work.