Non-invertible copyright protection of digital images using DWT and SVD

Copyright protection of digital media has become a major concern for owners and providers of digital media such as images, audio, and video products. To provide the required copyright protection, watermarking has recently emerged as a major technology, offering many algorithms and techniques that have different characteristics and effectiveness. In this paper, we propose an imperceptible and robust digital image watermarking algorithm. The algorithm is based on cascading two powerful mathematical transforms; the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The algorithm, unlike most algorithms proposed earlier in the literature, is non-invertible. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and revealed a common misconception regarding the locations at which watermark information should be embedded to achieve robust and non-invertible SVD-based watermarking.