Efficient hybrid digital image watermarking

Abstract

Nowadays, multimedia security is a major issue. Images, video, audio, and text files lose credibility in most times, because they face several attacks related to illegal distribution, duplication, and manipulation of the information conveyed by them. Digital watermarking is an important tool for protecting digital content. This paper introduces an efficient hybrid digital image watermarking scheme. It consists of two stages of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The first one is the embedding stage, which is performed by using SVD followed by block-based SVD (B-SVD). The second stage is the extraction stage, which depends on the SVD on the whole image and then B-SVD to get the original watermarks. In this scheme, the watermarking requirements are satisfied, while capacity is increased. Furthermore, watermark detection, robustness, and security are improved. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by the correlation coefficient Cr between the original and extracted watermarks, and the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) between the original and watermarked images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has a good performance, where Cr reaches 0.9975 and PSNR reaches 45.8605. It is more secure than the previous schemes, when subjected to attacks. In addition, the proposed scheme is compared to the most recent schemes, revealing its superiority.