Image Watermarking Scheme Using Singular Value Decomposition, Quantization and Genetic Algorithm

Digital Watermarking and data hiding has become an important tool for protecting digital images from theft, illegal copying and unlawful reproduction. Some digital watermarking algorithms were proposed using spatial domain and transform domain. The transform domain could be DFT, DCT, DWT or SVD. Several digital watermarking algorithms using Genetic Algorithms are available in the literature. In this paper, a modified image watermarking scheme based on Singular Value Decomposition using Genetic Algorithm (GA) is proposed. The proposed scheme is based on quantization step size optimization using the Genetic Algorithm to improve the quality of watermarked image and robustness of the watermark. This method is more secure and robust to attacks, viz., Low Pass Filtering, Median Filtering, JPEG Compression, Resizing, Row-Column blanking, Row-Column Copying etc. Superior experimental results are observed with the proposed scheme over an algorithm proposed by Sun et al. in terms of Normalized Cross correlation (NC) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR).