A Hybrid robust watermarking system based on discrete cosine transform, discrete wavelet transform, and singular value decomposition

Digital data sharing is increased day by day due to the rapid access of the Internet by mass people. Multimedia, for example text, image, video, and audio can be easily accessed by unauthorized users. To ensure multimedia security, researchers are focusing on digital image watermarking. A robust watermarking system must satisfy the basic design requirements like imperceptibility, robustness, security, and payload capacity. Watermarking can be embedded into a host image through different transform operations, such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). However, a single transformation does not ensure all the design requirements simultaneously. To fill this gap, a hybrid blind digital image watermarking with a combination of DCT, DWT, and SVD is proposed in this paper. At first, the Arnold map is used to encrypt the watermark image. Then DCT is applied to it and to the host image followed by DWT before SVD. After that, the watermarked image is generated by embedding the watermark image into the host image. The performance is evaluated under various attacks and experimental results show that our algorithm ensures improved robustness while preserving high imperceptibility and enhanced security than the state-of-the-art methods.