A New Chaotic Image Watermarking Scheme Based on SVD and IWT

Abstract

Image watermarking schemes based on singular value decomposition (SVD) have become popular due to a good trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility. However, the false positive problem (FPP) is the main drawback of SVD-based watermarking schemes. The singular value is the main cause of FPP issues because it a fixed value that does not hold structural information of an image. In this paper, a new SVD-based image watermarking scheme that uses a chaotic map is proposed to overcome this issue. The secret key is first extracted from both the host and watermark image. This key is used to generate a new chaotic matrix and chaotic multiple scaling factors (CMSF) to increase the sensitivity of the proposed scheme. The watermark image is then transformed based on the chaotic matrix before being directly embedded into the singular value of the host image by using the CMSF. The extracted secret key is unique to the host and the watermark images, which improves security and overcomes FPP issues. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme fulfils all watermarking requirements in terms of robustness, imperceptibility, security, and payload. Furthermore, it achieves high robustness with different scaling factors, and outperforms several existing schemes.