DWT-SVD and DCT based robust and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection

In this article, a new DWT-SVD and DCT with Arnold Cat Map encryption based robust and blind watermarking scheme is proposed for copyright protection. The proposed scheme solves the most frequently occurring watermarking security problems in Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based schemes which are unauthorized reading and false-positive detection. This scheme also optimizes fidelity and robustness characteristics. The grey image watermark splits into two parts using four bits MSBs and four bits LSBs of each pixel. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of these MSBs and LSBs values are embedded into the middle singular value of each block having size 4 × 4 of the host image’s one level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) sub-bands. The reason for incorporating Arnold Cat Map in the proposed scheme is to encode the watermark image before embedding it in the host image. The proposed scheme is a blind scheme and does not require the choice of scaling factor. Thus, the proposed scheme is secure as well as free from the false positive detection problem. The proposed watermarking scheme is tested for various malicious and non-malicious attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the scheme is robust, imperceptible and secure to several attacks and common signal processing operations.