Hybrid image watermarking scheme using SVD and PDFB based contourlet transform

Copyright protection of intellectual property is a very large and growing business. This is due to the easier availability of all multimedia data with just a click of a mouse, resulting to the increase of piracy. Watermarking is one of the popular methods of authentication to help protect intellectual property rights. Of the various forms of multimedia data image is one of the most popular variant. Here a method of digital image watermarking is presented using singular value decomposition (SVD) which one of the very popular mathematical computation tools. Along with it a lot of transforms have been used earlier like discrete wavelet transform (DWT), DCT, Fourier transform, etc. to provide hybrid techniques. But here an unconventional transform introduced in the middle of this decade, called contourlet transform (CT) has been used. This transform being similar to DWT fits well to provide a robust watermarking scheme along with the SVD. Here the combination of pyramidal and directional filter bank (PDFB) in CT has been used.