Comment on “Robust blind image watermarking scheme based on Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition”

It is shown that the robust blind image watermarking scheme based on Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition proposed by Makbol and Khoo in this AEÜ journal has a fundamental flaw in its design that undermines the security of its scheme against the false-positive problem. More crucially, this result therefore invalidates the objective of the scheme that is to achieve ownership protection, so the scheme cannot be used. In more detail, an adversary is able to claim ownership of a watermarked image by extracting his watermark from the image, although his watermark has never been inserted into the image in the first place. We then verified the flaw through experimental results and thus, proved that the Makbol and Khoo scheme was not able to solve the false-positive problem as claimed and should not be used for proof of ownership applications. In discussing ways to mitigate the problem, we investigate an approach that would have worked quite efficiently if Discrete Wavelet Transform was used instead of Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform.