Hybrid Non-Blind Watermarking Based on DWT and SVD

Watermarking is identified as a major technology to achieve copyright protection and multimedia security. Therefore, recent studies in literature include some evident approaches for embedding data into a multimedia element. Because of its useful frequency component separation, the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is commonly used in 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 non-blind scheme based on DWT and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). After decomposing the cover image into four sub bands (LL, HL, LH and HH), we apply the SVD to LL band and modify diagonal singular value coefficients with the watermark itself by using a scaling factor. Finally, LL band coefficients are reconstructed with modified singular values and inverse DWT is applied to obtain watermarked image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is considerably robust and reliable. In comparison to the previous literature, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values of watermarked images are increased by approximately 20%. In terms of PSNR values before and after attacks and of normalized similarity ratio (NSR); although watermark is embedded into LL sub band; our proposed method gives much more satisfactory results on filtering, scaling, Gaussian, JPEG compression, rotation and cropping than that of previous literature.