Hybrid DWT–SVD Digital Image Watermarking for Robust Copyright Protection

Abstract

Rapid increase in the number of digital multimedia sharing has generated the need for advanced methods for protecting the ownership of images to prevent their reproduction. For this purpose, in this paper, we suggest a hybrid method for digital image watermarking using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The watermark is inserted in the LL sub-band in order to find a proper balance between visual transparency and robustness against image manipulations. The suggested method has been implemented in MATLAB R2023b on a set of standard color benchmark images. The performance of this technique has been evaluated using MSE, PSNR, SSIM, NC, and BER metrics. Experimental results show that the watermarking scheme causes only minor image degradation with good image fidelity with the values of PSNR from 38 dB to 51 dB and values of SSIM close to one. Moreover, robustness has been investigated against different image manipulation procedures such as additive Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, speckle noise, JPEG compression, rotation, and cropping of images. The achieved results show that the suggested hybrid DWT-SVD watermarking scheme can be considered an effective solution for copyright protection of digital images.