A secure blind discrete wavelet transform based watermarking scheme using two-level singular value decomposition

In this paper, a secure blind image watermarking scheme is proposed to improve efficiency of hybrid Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based schemes. The main contribution of this research is using two-level singular value decomposition in hybrid DWT+SVD watermarking schemes results to high improvement in both imperceptibility and robustness. Also, security is ensured in this scheme by proposing a two-level authentication system for watermark extraction in which not only the false positive problem is eliminated, when the attacks are very severe, the false negative effect is also detected and prevented. In the proposed scheme, the cover image is initially transformed to DWT and the high frequency sub bands are selected. Subsequently, High (HH) sub band is divided into 8 x 8 non overlapping blocks and the SVD transform is applied to each of them. In SVD transform, the highest energy compaction is in the first row and the first column of the matrix of singular values. These singular values for each block will be collected in a separate matrix and then the second SVD transform will be exerted on the produced matrix. The singular values of the watermark image after exerting one level DWT, is embedded into the singular values of this matrix. Experimental result shows when the scheme is subjected to ten most common types of signal processing and geometric attacks, using the second level of SVD makes it highly robust and imperceptible while it is independent from type of image. So, the proposed scheme is tested and certified for both medical and normal images. This scheme is compared to a range of hybrid schemes using DWT and one level SVD, and experimental results show high improvements in imperceptibility with the average of 46.6950 db and robustness more than 99% and proven efficiency in security. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.