A robust quantization-based image watermarking scheme in the wavelet-based contourlet domain

Watermarking has attracted much attention in last decade due to its application in copyright protection of digital multimedia. In this paper, a blind watermarking scheme in the wavelet-based contourlet domain using the singular value decomposition technique is proposed. To realize a blind watermarking scheme, quantization-based embedding and extraction procedures are employed. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed watermarking scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms some of the existing schemes in terms of imperceptibility of the embedded watermark and providing lower bit error rate values. It is also shown that the proposed watermarking scheme is more robust against various kinds of attacks such as compression, median filtering, scaling and Gaussian noise, than other existing methods.