A Reliable Image Watermarking Scheme Based on Redistributed Image Normalization and SVD

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is the process of concealing secret information in a digital image for protecting its rightful ownership. Most of the existing block based singular value decomposition (SVD) digital watermarking schemes are not robust to geometric distortions, such as rotation in an integer multiple of ninety degree and image flipping, which change the locations of the pixels but don't make any changes to the pixel's intensity of the image. Also, the schemes have used a constant scaling factor to give the same weightage to the coefficients of different magnitudes that results in visible distortion in some regions of the watermarked image. Therefore, to overcome the problems mentioned here, this paper proposes a novel image watermarking scheme by incorporating the concepts of redistributed image normalization and variable scaling factor depending on the coefficient's magnitude to be embedded. Furthermore, to enhance the security and robustness the watermark is shuffled by using the piecewise linear chaotic map before the embedding. To investigate the robustness of the scheme several attacks are applied to seriously distort the watermarked image. Empirical analysis of the results has demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed scheme.