Color Image Zero-Watermarking Based on SVD and Visual Cryptography in DWT Domain

This paper presents a novel robust color image zero-watermarking scheme based on SVD and visual cryptography. We firstly generate the image feature from the SVD of the image blocks, and then employ the visual secret sharing scheme to construct ownership share from the watermark and the image feature. The low frequency component of one level discrete wavelet transform of the color image is partitioned into blocks. Then we propose to use the feature generated from the first singular value of the blocks to construct the master share. When ownership debate occurs, the ownership share is used to extract the watermark. Experimental results show the better performance of the proposed watermarking system in terms of robustness to various attacks, including noise, filtering, JPEG compression and so on, than other visual cryptography based color image watermarking algorithm.