A digital watermarking scheme based on singular value decomposition and tiny genetic algorithm

A robust digital image watermarking scheme based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and a tiny genetic algorithm (Tiny-GA) is proposed in this paper. Previous works have shown that both one-way and non-symmetric properties of SVD make it desirable for watermarking techniques. The produced singular values are very stable and vary very little under various image processing operations or attacks. In the proposed scheme, the singular values of a cover image are modified by multiple scale factors to embed the watermark image. Since the values of scale factors determine the watermark strength; therefore, we use the Tiny-GA to search the proper values in order to improve the visual quality of the watermarked image and the robustness of the watermark. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is able to withstand a variety of image processing attacks.