Block based embedding of encrypted watermarks using singular value decomposition

Watermarking is a solution to the problem of copyright protection of multimedia documents over the Internet. This paper presents a block based watermarking scheme using the singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm to embed encrypted watermarks into digital images. The paper compares between the traditional method of Liu and the proposed method for embedding encrypted watermarks. Also, a permutation based encryption algorithm and a diffusion based encryption algorithm are compared as the watermark encryption algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the traditional method of Liu for embedding encrypted watermarks and extracting them efficiently under attacks. Results also show that it is preferred to use permutation based encryption algorithms than diffusion based encryption algorithms for watermark encryption due to their lower sensitivity to attacks. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.