A new blind energy based DWT-SVD domain watermarking using error control coding

Abstract

The growth of data communication networks has made digital watermarking an important issue for copyright and content protection. Achieving high level of robustness and good transparency are the main objectives of developing every digital watermarking algorithm. From among transform domains as the basis of watermark hiding place, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) are the most commonly used transforms in literature. In this paper we propose a new hybrid DWT-SVD domain watermarking scheme taking into account the energy content of every chosen block of the selected DWT sub-band coefficients. Before embedding, we append a special class of forward error correcting codes into watermark sequence to improve robustness against all kinds of attacks. In our proposed method, watermark embedding is performed by manipulating a new defined metric based on singular values of each block and watermark extraction is done blindly i.e., without using the original cover image. Experimental results show a good level of imperceptibility and better resistance against different kinds of attacks specially JPEG compression.