A ROBUST DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING BASED ON SINGULAR VALUE DECOMPOSITION AND TABU-SEARCH

Digital Watermarking has become an essential tool for protecting copyrights of digital data. A singular value decomposition (SVD) and Tabu Search based digital image watermarking method has been proposed. In this approach, the singular value of the original data has been modified using multiple scaling factors for embedding the watermark image. These multiple scaling factors are generated using a meta-heuristic approach known as Tabu search. The Watermarked image obtained by the proposed approach is robust under various attacks such as rotation, cropping, JPEG compression, Histogram equalization, Average filtering and Gaussian noise. The experiment done on the standard benchmark data set shows the proposed algorithm which uses Tabu Search is more robust than the best known algorithm which uses Genetic Algorithms (GA).