Robust image watermarking based on discrete wavelet transform-discrete cosine transform-singular value decomposition

A robust image watermarking scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. The cover image is transformed from the RGB color space into the YCbCr color space to obtain a gray-level image. The DWT is then applied to the gray-level image to obtain a low-frequency (LL) subband image. Next, the DCT is applied to the LL subband image to obtain the frequency components. Finally, SVD is used on the obtained frequency components to embed the watermark. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust against cropping, rotation, Gaussian noise additions, histogram equalization, JPEG compression, and JPEG2000 compression attacks. Therefore, the proposed method is very suitable for applications of transaction tracking, data authentication, and video surveillance. (C) 2012 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.21.3.033005]