Robust logo watermarking using biometrics inspired key generation

•A novel logo watermarking scheme based on FrWPT and SVD is proposed.•This work essentially gives the key-concept to SVD based watermarking.•The employed keys are driven from the biometrics of the user/owner.•A novel solution for the ambiguity problem of SVD based watermarking is also proposed.•Experiments show good performance and outperform the related techniques.

In this paper, a novel logo watermarking technique with key concept is proposed using fractional wavelet packet transform (FrWPT), non-linear chaotic map and singular value decomposition (SVD). The core idea is to use biometrically generated keys in the embedding process of gray-scale watermark. Therefore, this paper first proposes a method for generating keys from biometrics efficiently. Then the host image is first randomized with the help of non-linear chaotic map followed by the embedding in the FrWPT domain by modifying the singular values of the randomized image. Further, in order to enhance the security, an authentication key is formed to authenticate the watermarked image. Finally, a reliable extraction process is proposed to extracted watermark from the possibly attacked authenticate watermarked image. The security, attack and comparative analysis confirm high security, efficiency and robustness of the proposed watermarking technique. Further, an efficient solution is also proposed to deal with the ambiguous situations created by SVD in watermarking.