A Robust Zero-Watermarking Scheme in Spatial Domain by Achieving Features Similar to Frequency Domain

In recent years, there has been a substantial surge in the application of image watermarking, which has evolved into an essential tool for identifying multimedia material, ensuring security, and protecting copyright. Singular value decomposition (SVD) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) are widely utilized in digital image watermarking despite the considerable computational burden they involve. By combining block-based direct current (DC) values with matrix norm, this research article presents a novel, robust zero-watermarking approach. It generates a zero-watermark without attempting to modify the contents of the image. The image is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks, and DC values are computed without applying DCT. This sub-image is further partitioned into non-overlapping blocks, and the maximum singular value of each block is calculated by matrix norm instead of SVD to obtain the binary feature matrix. A piecewise linear chaotic map encryption technique is utilized to improve the security of the watermark image. After that, the feature image is created via XOR procedure between the encrypted watermark image and the binary feature matrix. The proposed scheme is tested using a variety of distortion attacks including noise, filter, geometric, and compression attacks. It is also compared with the other relevant image watermarking methods and outperformed them in most cases.