PSO optimized and secured watermarking scheme based on DWT and SVD

Abstract

The present study proposed a robust and secure watermarking scheme to authenticate the digital images for ownership claim. The proposed watermarking scheme is making use of 2-level of DWT (Discrete wavelet transform) to provide high capacity of watermark embedding. The SVD (singular value decomposition) is performed on the host and watermark images. Then, principal components are calculated for watermark image. The use of principal components for watermark embedding makes the scheme free from false positive error. PSO (particle swarm optimization) optimized multiple scaling factors along with principal components are utilized for watermark embedding in the singular values of host image. The PSO-optimized scaling factor provides a very good tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking scheme. The scheme is also extended to use for color images. The proposed scheme provides a secured and high data embedding with good robustness toward different signal processing attacks.