Adaptive SVD-based digital image watermarking

Abstract

Digital data utilization along with the increase popularity of the Internet has facilitated information sharing and distribution. However, such applications have also raised concern about copyright issues and unauthorized modification and distribution of digital data. Digital watermarking techniques which are proposed to solve these problems hide some information in digital media and extract it whenever needed to indicate the data owner. In this paper a new method of image watermarking based on singular value decomposition (SVD) of images is proposed which considers human visual system prior to embedding watermark by segmenting the original image into several blocks of different sizes, with more density in the edges of the image. In this way the original image quality is preserved in the watermarked image. Additional advantages of the proposed technique are large capacity of watermark embedding and robustness of the method against different types of image manipulation techniques. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.