Optimized DWT SVD Based Image Watermarking Scheme Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The robust watermarking techniques have gained popularity over last decade as more and more digital contents are being shared over Internet. This increase in data transmission also poses greater risk of various attacks which hamper data authenticity, integrity and quality. Therefore, efficient mechanisms are required that can handle robust transmission of digital data while honoring the Digital Right Management (DRM) protection measures of copyrighted content. In this paper, we explore an optimized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based watermarking scheme on digital images in the hybrid Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and Singular value decomposition (SVD) transform. The watermark is embedded in the host images by using both single scaling and multiple scaling factors for optimizing the visual quality of the signed images viz-a-viz robustness. Eight gray-scale and six colored images are used to carry out the experiments. Comparison of the proposed watermarking scheme with other techniques ascertain the proposed scheme outperforms others and it also fulfills all requisite conditions to be a robust and optimized watermarking scheme.