An Optimized Image Watermarking Method Based on HD and SVD in DWT Domain

In this paper, a novel image watermarking method is proposed which is based on discrete wave transformation (DWT), Hessenberg decomposition (HD), and singular value decomposition (SVD). First, in the embedding process, the host image is decomposed into a number of sub-bands through multi-level DWT, and the resulting coefficients of which are then used as the input for HD. The watermark is operated on the SVD at the same time. The watermark is finally embedded into the host image by the scaling factor. Fruit fly optimization algorithm, one of the natural-inspired optimization algorithms is devoted to find the scaling factor through the proposed objective evaluation function. The proposed method is compared to other research works under various spoof attacks, such as the filter, noise, JPEG compression, JPEG2000 compression, and sharpening attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed image watermarking method has a good trade-off between robustness and invisibility even for the watermarks with multiple sizes.