A robust image watermarking technique based on DWT, APDCBT, and SVD

Abstract

Copyright protection for digital multimedia has become a research hotspot in recent years. As an efficient solution, the digital watermarking scheme has emerged at the right moment. In this article, a highly robust and hybrid watermarking method is proposed. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) presented in recent years as well as the singular value decomposition (SVD) are adopted in this method to insert and recover the watermark. To enhance the watermark imperceptibility, the direct current (DC) coefficients after block-based APDCBT in high frequency sub-bands (LH and HL) are modified by using the watermark. Compared with the conventional SVD-based watermarking method and another watermarking technique, the watermarked images obtained by the proposed method have higher image quality. In addition, the proposed method achieves high robustness in resisting various image processing attacks.