Robust DWT-SVD domain image watermarking

TLDR

Digital multimedia protection is increasingly important, and watermarking—especially DWT‑based schemes—has become a key technology for copyright protection. This paper proposes a hybrid DWT–SVD watermarking scheme. The scheme decomposes the cover image into four DWT bands, applies SVD to each band, and embeds the watermark by modifying singular values in all bands. Embedding across all frequency bands yields robustness against a wide range of attacks.

Abstract

Protection of digital multimedia content has become an increasingly important issue for content owners and service providers. As watermarking is identified as a major technology to achieve copyright protection, the relevant literature includes several distinct approaches for embedding data into a multimedia element (primarily images, audio, and video). Because of its growing popularity, the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is commonly used in recent watermarking schemes. In a DWT-based scheme, the DWT coefficients are modified with the data that represents the watermark. In this paper, we present a hybrid scheme based on DWT and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). After decomposing the cover image into four bands, we apply the SVD to each band, and embed the same watermark data by modifying the singular values. Modification in all frequencies allows the development of a watermarking scheme that is robust to a wide range of attacks.