A two way secured high imperceptible digital color image watermarking

The following study introduces a digital watermarking technique that is both imperceptible and secure. It uses Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), as well as Human Visual System (HVS) principles. This approach ensures two-way security by first inserting a randomized binary sequence, followed by embedding a logo that relates to copyright ownership. A color image is initially transformed into Hue, Saturation, and Value (HSV) color space, and then the 2-level DWT is applied on its V channel components. From there, the decomposed components LH, HL, and HH are divided into 4 x 4 blocks and transformed into singular values using SVD. LH singular values are utilized to incorporate a random binary sequence, while the watermark logo is embedded in the singular values of HL and HH. The results of the exploratory analysis demonstrate that the method presented is effective against various types of attacks, including Salt and Pepper, Scaling, Gaussian noise, and JPEG compression when applied to standard image samples. After undergoing multiple attacks, the proposed approach demonstrates superior performance in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC), Mean Square Error (MSE), and Perception-based Image Quality Evaluation (PIQE) when compared to traditional watermarking techniques.