Efficient digital watermarking based on SVD and PSO with multiple scaling factor

Abstract

Digital Watermarking, that is used for protection against digital piracy, tampering etc, has a lot of uses apart from protection like media forensics, improvement to digital communication quality, accurate audience monitoring, medical applications and so on. We present, here in this work, an invisible robust non-blind Digital Watermarking algorithm to maintain acceptable levels of imperceptibility and robustness at the same time using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with multiple scaling factor. Application of such scheme provides an avenue for optimization of the strength-of-the-watermark (scaling factor) for attaining high robustness against watermarking attacks while maintaining the visual quality of the cover object. Our algorithm is found to exhibit significant performance improvement over the usage of constant scaling factors in Singular Value Decomposition based Digital Watermarking algorithm.