Image watermarking based on integer wavelet transform-singular value decomposition with variance pixels

Abstract

With the era of rapid technology in multimedia, the copyright protection is very important to preserve an ownership of multimedia data. This paper proposes an image watermarking scheme based on Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The binary watermark is scrambled by Arnold transform before embedding watermark. Embedding locations are determined by using variance pixels. Selected blocks with the lowest variance pixels are transformed by IWT, thus the LL sub-band of 8×8 IWT is computed by using SVD. The orthogonal U matrix component of U3,1 and U4,1 are modified using certain rules by considering the watermark bits and an optimal threshold. This research reveals an optimal threshold value based on the trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility of watermarked image. In order to measure the watermarking performance, the proposed scheme is tested under various attacks. The experimental results indicate that our scheme achieves higher robustness than other scheme under different types of attack.