Hardware Implementation of SVD Based Colour Image Watermarking in Wavelet Domain

While it has become very easy to process and store digital images effectively, it has also paved way for ease in illegal production and redistribution. Watermarking is the best way to protect digital image against illegal recording and distribution. From the literature survey, it has been affirmed that the frequency domain techniques are more robust than spatial domain techniques. In this paper a singular value decomposition (SVD) based watermarking is executed in wavelet domain. This paper proposes the design and hardware implementation of a fast RGB to YUV converter by standard NTSC conversion and reconstruction formulae using optimal 2-D systolic arrays for matrix multiplication.The scheme have been implemented in Altera Cyclone II FPGA. The hardware implementation of 2D DWT decomposition and IDWT reconstruction were implemented in Xilinx xc3s1000-4fg320. Watermarks inserted in the lowest frequencies (LL subband) are resistant to certain group of attacks, and watermarks embedded in highest frequencies (HH subband) are resistant to another group of attacks. Embedding the same watermark in all 4 blocks, will make it extremely difficult to remove or destroy the watermark from all frequency subbands. The proposed algorithm is less resilient to geometric distortion including rotation, scaling and translation. The hardware implementation watermarking schemes has advantages over the software implementation in terms of high performance, and reliability. A hybrid SVD image watermarking in wavelet domain, will have more robustness.