Reliable RGB color image watermarking using DWT and SVD

This paper proposes a reliable RGB color image watermarking which uses discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) for embedding and extracting watermark. The DWT and SVD applied on the watermark image increase information hiding capacity and perceptual similarity of the watermarked image. In the watermarking embedded stage, the processed watermark information using the proposed method is embedded into three color components (R, G and B) with an optimum watermarking scaling factor (α). In the extraction stage, the resultant watermark is calculated by averaging the three extracted watermarks from R, G and B components. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high normalized correlation (NC) of the extracted watermark and high peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the watermarked image after several image processing attacks. In addition, the proposed method outperforms other conventional methods in terms of perceptual similarity, robustness, and detection rate.