Robust multi-scale full-band image watermarking for copyright protection

Abstract

With the exponential growth of digital materials in this age, the protection of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) becomes an important and urgent topic. In this paper, we propose a novel digital watermarking scheme based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method and the Distributed Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DDWT) method. Our scheme transforms original image data from the spatial domain into the frequency domain by using the multi-scale DDWT technique, and then applies the SVD technique by modifying singular values of two sub-bands with watermark data and the DDWT watermarking embedding process on the rest two sub-bands. Thus, watermark information is embedded into the four sub-bands of the last scale. We exploit both of the advantages of the DDWT method, which is robust against one kind of geometric attack, i.e. the cropping attack, and the SVD method, which is robust against other geometric attacks and non-geometric attacks. Experimental results show that the quality of the stego-image is superior and the embedded watermark has high resistance against a variety of common geometric and non-geometric attacks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.