Robust color image watermarking based on singular value decomposition and Dual tree complex wavelet transform

In this paper, we propose an SVD-based watermarking scheme in complex wavelet domain for color image. This latter is transformed into the YCbCr color space and the watermark is put on each color component of the resulted images. The 2-level Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) is applied to each of the three color component image. And we apply the SVD to each high-pass subband, and modify the singular values of the host image with the singular values of the 1-level DT-CWT-transformed watermark image. Insertion in all color components allows the development of a watermarking algorithm that is robust against some signal processing operations, such as gaussian blur, gaussian noise, pixelation, JPEG compression, scaling, contrast adjustment, histogram equalization, gamma correction, rotation and cropping. We compare our proposed algorithm with a pure SVD-based scheme, and show that it is considerably more robust and effective.