Sushila Kamble, Vikas Maheshkar, Suneeta Agarwal and Vinay K Srivastava, MNNIT, Allahabad, India

In this paper, a new robust watermarking technique for copyright protection based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition is proposed. The high frequency subband of the wavelet decomposed cover image is modified by modifying its singular values. A secret key is generated from the original watermark with the help of visual cryptography to claim the ownership of the image. The ownership of the image can be claimed by superimposing this secret key on the extracted watermark from the watermarked image. The robustness of the technique is tested by applying different attacks and the visual quality of the extracted watermark after applying these attacks is good. Also, the visual quality of the watermarked image is undistinguishable from the original image.

Image watermarking; Visual Cryptography; Singular Value Decomposition; Discrete Wavelet Transform; Robustness