A Geometric Distortion Resilient Image Watermarking Algorithm Based on SVD

Abstract

Many digital watermarks now available for images are sensitive to geometric distortions, which particularly prevent blind detection of a public watermark. In this paper, a watermarking algorithm based on singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed, which is robust to common geometric distortions. The watermark is embedded into image's singular values. By the algebraic properties of SVD, it is proved rigorously that singular values of the watermarked image are invariant when it goes through the geometric distortions of transpose, mirror reflection, rotation, scale, and translation. Experimental results show that the watermarking algorithm performs well in robustness. The embedded watermark can be detected reliably, following these geometric distortions, usual signal processing, or JPEG compression.