SVD-Based Image Watermarking Using the Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform, Key Mapping, and Coefficient Ordering for Ownership Protection

Abstract

Proof of ownership on multimedia data exposes users to significant threats due to a myriad of transmission channel attacks over distributed computing infrastructures. In order to address this problem, in this paper, an efficient blind symmetric image watermarking method using singular value decomposition (SVD) and the fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT) is proposed for ownership protection. Initially, Gaussian mapping is used to scramble the watermark image and secure the system against unauthorized detection. Then, FWHT with coefficient ordering is applied to the cover image. To make the embedding process robust and secure against severe attacks, two unique keys are generated from the singular values of the FWHT blocks of the cover image, which are kept by the owner only. Finally, the generated keys are used to extract the watermark and verify the ownership. The simulation result demonstrates that our proposed scheme is highly robust against numerous attacks. Furthermore, comparative analysis corroborates its superiority among other state-of-the-art methods. The NC of the proposed method is numerically one, and the PSNR resides from 49.78 to 52.64. In contrast, the NC of the state-of-the-art methods varies from 0.7991 to 0.9999, while the PSNR exists in the range between 39.4428 and 54.2599.

Blind Color Image Watermarking Using Fan Beam Transform and QR Decomposition

“…In this study, in order to get good result, the chosen value for ∆, β, and m are 42, 10, and 4, respectively which are used as secret key K. Table 1 illustrates an analysis between the suggested and various recent algorithms [19][20][21] for imperceptibility of various images. From this Table, we noticed that the PSNR and SSIM values of the suggested algorithm range from 54.1823 to 54.1823 and 0.9285 to 0.9696, respectively, whereas the PSNR and SSIM values of the recent methods range from 48.62 to 53.32 and 0.9321 to 0.9123, respectively Symmetry 2020, 12, 486 9 of 14 indicating that the suggested algorithm has higher PSNR and SSIM than the recent advanced methods presented in [19][20][21]. This is because watermark data is placed into the first row fourth column of the matrix R attained from the FBT coefficients of b * component of original host image.…”

“…Besides, it yields watermarked images with high quality. Furthermore, it shows more excellent result in comparison with the recent state-of-the-art algorithms [19][20][21] for imperceptibility and robustness. It is because watermark information is inserted into the first row fourth column of the upper triangular matrix acquired from the FBT coefficients of b * component of original image using a new embedding equation.…”

“…To assess the imperceptibility (i) peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) [19][20][21] and (ii) structural similarity (SSIM) [19,20,22] were considered. Normalized correlation (NC) is used to measure robustness of our proposed algorithm [19][20][21]. These are represented by the following equations:…”

“…Spatial domain algorithms are straightforward to perform but less robust to numerous attacks [4]. At the same time, transform domain algorithms [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] are robust against diverse attacks.…”

“…This method is robust against attacks; however, it has low imperceptibility. Khanam et al [21] suggested a blind technique based on fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT), SVD, key mapping, and coefficient ordering. It has high robustness against numerous attacks but its imperceptibility result is little low.…”