Digital watermarking has attracted increasing attentions as it has been the current solution to copyright protection and content authentication in today's digital transformation, which has become an issue to be addressed in multimedia technology. In this paper, we propose an advanced image watermarking system based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in combination with the singular value decomposition (SVD). Firstly, at the sender side, DWT is applied on a grayscale cover image and then eigendecomposition is performed on original HH (high-high) components. Similar operation is done on a grayscale watermark image. Then, two unitary and one diagonal matrices are combined to form a digital watermarked image applying inverse discrete wavelet transform (iDWT). The diagonal component of original image is transmitted through secured channel. At the receiver end, the watermark image is recovered using the watermarked image and diagonal component of the original image. Finally, we compare the original and recovered watermark image and obtained perfect normalized correlation. Simulation consequences indicate that the presented scheme can satisfy the needs of visual imperceptibility and also has high security and strong robustness against many common attacks and signal processing operations. The proposed digital image watermarking system is also compared to state-of-the-art methods to confirm the reliability and supremacy.

Keywords: Copyright protection; Digital image watermarking; Discrete wavelet transform (DWT); Imperceptibility; Robustness; Singular value decomposition (SVD).

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022.