An Adaptive Block-Based Watermarking Scheme Using RDWT-SVD and Particle Swarm Optimization

The major goal of digital image watermarking is to acquire security, robustness and reliability against various attacks. To achieve this objective, embedding the watermark into the cover image and selecting the embedding factor is a tedious task. In this paper presents a Redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT), block-based singular value decomposition (SVD), and secure and robust image watermarking method using particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique for choosing the scale factor. The presented method first decomposed the cover image using RDWT and then segmented all sub-bands into non-overlapping blocks. SVD is enforced on the LL sub-band and modifies the singular values of these blocks by the watermark image. PSO is used for selecting the scaling factor to increase imperceptibility and robustness. The experimental outcomes show that the presented method performs well as compared to previously introduced techniques, is more imperceptible and highly robust against the various image processing attacks, and also removes the diagonal line problem from the extracted watermark. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.