SVD-based image water marking

Advances in Internet technology have considerably facilitated the acquisition, representation, storage and distribution of images in digital format. These advances, however, made the unauthorized manipulation and reproduction of original digital images an easy process. Consequently, the design and development of effective digital image copyright protection methods have become necessary. Recently, digital image watermarking has emerged as a major technology to prevent illegal and malicious copying and distribution of digital images by embedding an unnoticeable information into the image content. In this paper, we propose an imperceptible and robust digital image watermarking algorithm. The algorithm is based on cascading two powerful mathematical transforms; the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Combining the two transforms compensates for the drawbacks of each other, resulting in a very effective watermarking. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.