Block Based Blind & Secure Gray Image Watermarking Technique Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition

In this paper block based blind secure gray image watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition is proposed. In devising the proposed scheme, security is given high importance along with other two requirements: robustness and imperceptibility. The use of discrete wavelet transform not only improves robustness but the selection of bands with high tolerance towards noise caused an improvement in terms of imperceptibility. The robustness further improved due to the involvement of singular vectors along with singular values in watermark embedding and extraction process. Finally, to achieve security, the selected DWT band is decomposed into smaller blocks and random blocks are chosen for modification. Furthermore, the elements of left and right singular vectors of selected blocks are chosen based on their dependence upon each other for watermark embedding. Various experiments using different images as host and watermark were conducted to examine and validate the proposed technique. Additionally, the proposed technique is tested against various attacks like compression, affine transformation, cropping, translation, X shearing, scaling, Y shearing, filtering, blurring, different kinds of noises, histogram equalization, rotation, etc. Lastly, the proposed technique is compared with state-of-the-art watermarking techniques and their comparison shows significant improvement of proposed scheme over existing techniques.