Image adaptive watermarking using wavelet domain singular value decomposition

In this letter, we propose a novel, yet simple, image-adaptive watermarking scheme for image authentication by applying a simple quantization-index-modulation process on wavelet domain singular value decomposition. Unlike the traditional wavelet-based watermarking schemes where the watermark bits are embedded directly on the wavelet coefficients, the proposed scheme is based on bit embedding on the singular value (luminance) of the blocks within wavelet subband of the original image. To improve the fidelity and the perceptual quality of the watermarked image and to enhance the security of watermarking, we model the adaptive quantization parameters based on the statistics of blocks within subbands. The scheme is robust against JPEG compression but extremely sensitive to malicious manipulation such as filtering and random noising. Watermark detection is efficient and blind in the sense only the quantization parameters but not the original image are required. The quantization parameters adaptive to blocks are vector quantized to reduce the watermarking overhead.