Host feasibility investigation to improve robustness in hybrid DWT+SVD based image watermarking schemes

Abstract

Today, we face different approaches to enhance the robustness of image watermarking schemes. Some of them can be implemented, but others in spite of spending money, energy, and time for programming purpose would fail because of not having a strong feasibility study plan before implementation. In this paper, we try to show a rational feasibility study before implementation of an image watermarking scheme. We develop our feasibility study by proposing three types of theoretical, mathematical, and experimental deductions. Based on the theoretical deduction, it is concluded that the "S" coefficients in the second level of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) offer high robustness to embed watermarks. To prove this, a mathematical deduction composed of two parts is presented and the same results were achieved. Finally, for experimental deduction, 60 different host images in both normal and medical images from various sizes of 256 256 to 1024 1024 were imposed to 9 common geometric and signal processing attacks and the resistances of "S" coefficients against the attacks in the first and second levels of SVD were compared. Experimental result shows significant enhancement in stability and robustness of the "S" coefficients in the second level of SVD in comparison to the first level. Consequently all theoretical, mathematical, and experimental deductions confirmed domination of the "S" coefficients in the second level of SVD than the first level. In this paper, we do not show any specific implementation for the watermarking scheme. Instead, we investigate the potential performance gains from the singular values (S), of the second level of SVD and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and prove their superiority in comparison to conventional SVD+DWT watermarking schemes.