A Secure Image Watermarking Scheme Based on DWT, SVD and Arnold Transform

Abstract

Abstract The rapid advancement and extensive growth in communication technology is creating a critical need to develop novel methods and techniques to protect copyright, ownership, authentication and content integrity of digital media. An efficient solution to this kind of problem is digital watermarking of multimedia. A watermark refers to a visible or invisible digital data to be embedded in a cover data so as to provide copyright protection at time when need arises. Numerous watermarking methods have been presented in the literature and several watermarking software packages have been developed in past decades. Still robustness and security of watermark against a variety of attacks is one of the most important issues to be solved. In this paper, techniques are presented for watermarking of 8-bit images. The watermark is subjected to Arnold Transform to introduce randomness, thus enhancing security and improving PSNR. Embedding is done in low frequency LL band of original image. Inverse Discrete wavelet Transform is then computed to obtain the watermarked image. The results are evaluated by applying number of attacks on the watermarked image. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking technique is robust and efficient.