A new blind robust image watermarking scheme in SVD-DCT composite domain

Digital watermarking has become an important technique for copyright protection, and various watermarking schemes have been proposed. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has been used as a valuable transform technique for robust digital watermarking due to some superior characteristics not obtained by DCT, DFT or DWT. In this paper, we present a new robust hybrid image watermarking scheme based on SVD and DCT. After applying SVD to the cover image blocks, we perform DCT on the macro block comprised of the first singular values (SVs) of each image block. We also developed a new method to embed the watermark in the high-frequency band of the SVD-DCT block by imposing a particular relationship between some pseudo-randomly selected pairs of the DCT coefficients. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method performs better than state-of-the-art SVD-based methods, and is comparable with the state-of-art wavelet-based robust image watermarking method.