Shuffled SVD based robust and secure digital image watermarking

Digital Image Watermarking provides a successful method for content authentication and copyright protection. Thus, it has significant scope in today's era due to the rapid growth of internet users. The watermark should be robust and reliable in addition to being imperceptible to the human eye. In this paper, a hybrid singular value decomposition (SVD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based watermarking scheme is presented. The SVD used in this scheme is a variant of the traditional SVD and is called shuffled SVD (SSVD). The cover image is decomposed into four sub-bands (LL, HL, LH, HH) using DWT. The LL subband is further divided into blocks of appropriate size. The principle components of the watermark image obtained after applying SSVD are embedded in various blocks of the LL sub-band. The proposed scheme shows significant robustness in addition to being false positive free.