Title: False-positive free transparent and optimal watermarking for colour images

Authors: Neha Singh; Sandeep Joshi; Shilpi Birla

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 303007, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 303007, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 303007, India

Abstract: Digital image watermarking serves as a tool for protection of ownership of the media shared on common platform. This paper presents a robust, blind watermarking technique for colour images based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Watermark is embedded in mid-frequency sub-bands of two-level DWT. These sub-bands are divided into non-overlapping blocks of size 4 × 4, each of which undergoes SVD. The singular values (SV) are updated based on watermark bit and using Lagrange's optimisation principle using two keys. Experiments show that the proposed technique is imperceptible with PSNR > 40 dB. Also, the technique can resist general image processing operations (attacks) on the images with the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) nearly 1 and sufficiently high bit correct ratio (BCR).

Keywords: image watermarking; image processing; singular value decomposition; SVD; discrete wavelet transform; DWT.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2020.109460

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2020 Vol.13 No.2/3/4, pp.319 - 338

Received: 18 Mar 2019
Accepted: 29 Oct 2019
Published online: 09 Sep 2020 *

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