A blind image copyright protection scheme for e-government

•A copyright scheme for e-government images is proposed by DCT and SVD.•The genetic algorithm is used to optimize the embedding parameters.•The proposed method leads the watermarked image to resist to various attacks.

An efficient blind copyright protection for e-government document images is proposed through a combination of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the singular value decomposition (SVD) based on genetic algorithm (GA). This combination could lead the watermarked image to be resistant to various attacks as well as to improve its performance, security and robustness. DCT, in this case, is applied to the entire image and mapped by a zigzag manner to four areas from the lowest to the highest frequencies. SVD, meanwhile, is applied in each area and then the singular value of DCT-transformed host image, subsequently, is modified in each area with the quantizing value using GA to increase the visual quality and the robustness. The host image is not needed in the watermark extraction and it is more useful than non-blind one in real-world applications. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other existing methods under several types of attacks.