A robust public key watermarking scheme based on improved singular value decomposition

Abstract

Digital watermarking has been considered as an effective solution for multimedia rightful protection and authentication. Singular value decomposition (SVD) is used for many watermarking schemes. This method has encountered some challenges, such as computational complexity and robustness. In this paper, instead of using the conventional SVD, we employed a new algorithm to directly compute the largest eigenvalue and eigenvector of segmented image blocks. Theoretically, by using this approach, our proposed watermarking scheme has computational complexity lower than various SVD based schemes. This improvement is essential for watermarking systems in practice, where ones often have to work with large-scale image datasets. Experimental results also showed that our watermarking scheme outperforms several widely used schemes in terms of robustness. Moreover, using the proposed algorithm, we designed a new robust public key watermarking scheme, where watermarked images can be verified without using the pre-defined watermark and a secret key.