An improved SVD-based watermarking technique for copyright protection

The drawbacks of SVD-based image watermarking are false positive, robust and transparency. The former can be overcome by embedding the principal components of the watermark into the host image, the latter is dependent on how much the quantity (i.e., scaling factor) of the principal components is embedded. For the existing methods, the scaling factor is a fixed value; actually, it is image-dependent. Different watermarks need the different scaling factors, although they are embedded in the same host image. In this paper, two methods are proposed to improve the reliability and robustness. To improve the reliability, for the first method, the principal components of the watermark are embedded into the host image in discrete cosine transform (DCT); and for the second method, those are embedded into the host image in discrete wavelets transform (DWT). To improve the robustness, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used for finding the suitable scaling factors. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed methods outperforms than those of the existing methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.