A new robust and secure digital image watermarking scheme based on the integer wavelet transform and singular value decomposition

•A new robust secure IWT–SVD image watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper.•It strongly achieved the watermarking requirements due to the IWT and SVD properties.•It outperformed among the compared schemes especially in robustness and security.•It addressed security weakness due to false positive problem using digital signature.•All the previous points makes the scheme a good choice for copyright protection.

In this paper, a new robust and secure digital image watermarking scheme that can be used for copyright protection is proposed. The scheme uses the integer wavelet transform (IWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The grey image watermark pixels values are embedded directly into the singular values of the 1-level IWT decomposed sub-bands. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of robustness, imperceptibility and capacity due to the IWT and SVD properties. A challenge due to the false positive problem which may be faced by most of SVD-based watermarking schemes has been solved in this work by adopting a digital signature into the watermarked image. The proposed digital signature mechanism is applied to generate and embed a digital signature after embedding the watermarks; the ownership is then authenticated before extracting watermarks. Thus, the proposed scheme achieved the security issue where the false positive problem is solved, in addition to that, the scheme is considered as a blind scheme. A computer simulation is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme and its robustness against various types of attacks and to compare it with some previous schemes. Furthermore, the statistical Wilcoxon signed rank test is employed to certify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.